Ganna's Quilts

Ganna's Quilts

March is National Quilting Month & March 20th was National Quilting Day. I didn’t want to let that pass without sharing something.

As you know by now, the biggest influencer in my life was my Grandma. Helen Holt Taylor was born in 1902 and lived through more historical events than I can even wrap my head around. It was hard to get her to talk about those things. “It’s in the past – what’s it matter” was a pretty typical response. Same with the people she’d crossed paths with - not that they weren't important but she really didn't believe in living in the past. So to grasp how many lives she touched, is completely impossible.

At a time when women were expected to marry young, have lots of children and tend to the house...she didn’t. In fact, she didn’t marry my grandfather until she was almost 40 and my dad, her only biological child, came along (much to the disbelief of some of their family) a few years later. She traveled this country – she explored, she experienced life, she wasn’t afraid to take on any challenge thrown at her. She lived through the Dust Bowl, she saw the Wright Brothers fly, women were granted the right to vote the year she turned 18, she ran farm equipment, she worked in so many different jobs...she was a pioneer in the true sense of the word.

She was also a very humble woman who didn’t do things for her acknowledgment or recognition. She did them because she saw a need she could fulfill. It’s just who she was. She brought the hobos that rode the trains into her home and fed and clothed them, she did service endlessly without a second thought, she gave without being asked, no one ever left her home hungry or wanting for anything. She never hesitated to go without if she thought someone else was in need of something she had. I often say if I can be even a fraction of the woman she was, I’ll consider my life a success.

She was a seamstress and was a whiz at sewing anything. I have her sewing machine sitting here in my front room (my “office”) and I treasure it. I’m nowhere near the magician she was with it, but I can sew a simple hem if I need to. (Yes, I wish I’d tried harder to learn more from her.) I love that machine though because it’s such an extension of her, who she was, the lives she touched and the good she did in this world. She put countless clothes on backs, but one of her unparalleled gifts was her quilting.

I can’t even begin to guess at how many quilts she made in her life. I know growing up it seemed like she was always working on one. Sometimes they were for a fundraising raffle at the library or a family member that was expecting a baby or getting married, but sometimes they were for people that I had no clue who they were. Her reach was immense and she never forgot anybody or anything important in their lives. Sometimes she did them partially on the machine, sometimes they were entirely hand stitched. Sometimes they were tied, sometimes they were quilted, sometimes they were both. There were patterns and scraps in piles that never made sense to me, but she had an exact inventory of everything in her head.

As a child, my parents both worked and I spent the majority of my time with her. I am pretty certain I spent as much time playing “fort” under a quilt that was on the racks in her front room as I did outside of that fort! There was something utterly magical laying under those quilts as they came together above me. I’d love to lay down there with a book or a puzzle listening to the conversations she and her friends were having as they sewed together and watched soap operas.

When I was a teenager she had this “project” that she’d work on when she had time between other ones and it was probably her most beautiful quilt. For a long time she wouldn’t tell me what it was for, but I nagged enough that eventually she did. She was working on my wedding quilt. After we got through me explaining how I wasn’t ever getting married and her telling me then it could stay in a box in the closet, we had a really hard conversation. She was 70 when I was born and she told me she’d love to think she was going to live forever, but she knew she wasn’t and she wanted to make it for me while her fingers would let her do what she envisioned.

At the time I didn’t want to think about it, but she was right. We lost her when I was 19, before I even met the man that I would marry. What became of the quilt? It stayed in a box under the bed until I was married. I could have used it sooner – no one but me would have known – but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I treasure that quilt. I treasure the woman that made it. I treasure the love that went into it. I treasure that I have it.

I don’t use it every day because the thought of something happening to it breaks my heart. Oh and trust me! She’d be the first person to remind me quilts were made to be used. She actually threatened on more than one occasion to start making ugly quilts so they wouldn’t end up in closets! (Between us, I don’t think she could have made an ugly quilt if she tried!) So during this time set aside to honor quilts and the beautiful traditions they come from, it seemed to fitting to remember the woman that was, hands down, the best seamstress to ever walk this earth.

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