Quilting Origins

This is a picture of a quilt that was started over 100 years ago by my great-great grandmother, and quilted pillow cases that I completed just this week as my first real quilt project. This "Quilting a Year" blog is about documenting the creation of a "covid quilt", a quilt made with the mask making fabric scraps of my 2020 sewing time (read more about that here).  But, since I've never quilted before, I had to start by learning the basics. Armed with Idiot's Guide to Quilting, I acquired some key tools: a rotary cutter, a handy cutting man with an ironing surface on the reverse, a quilting ruler, chalk marker, and a bunch of pins.

 

My very first project was a pair of placemats using flamingo themed fabric, and I learned quickly that quilting involved lots of patience and much more ironing than I imagined to make everything fit right and lie flat. I also learned that cutting a straight line is harder than it looks, and, despite my best efforts to cut out identical patchwork pieces for each placemat, I somehow ended up with placemats of two different sizes! 

My first quilting attempts  are a little uneven.

 

So I had already learned some things about what not to do by the time I started on my pillow cases.  I had also already begun to learn something about the limitations of machines. As I began to piece the star pattern  in the center of my pillowcase,  I realized that, even though I could do an ok job of using the sewing machine to put square and rectangular pieces together, I would need to stitch those diamond pieces together by hand in order to really learn the way they fit together correctly.  Add to that, the fact that I also did all the actual quilting work (the top stiching that connects the patchwork top, batting, and backing fabric), by hand, and the whole process became much more time intensive than I had originally thought it might be.

 

My newly completed hand quilted pillowcase.

Even though hand stitching can take up time, it is also a unique way of connecting across time by engaging in a craft that I know women in my family were taking part in over a century ago. In addition to my "quilting for idiot's" reading, I turned more than once to my great-grandmother's wedding quilt to help guide me in my work. For example, I took inspiration from the way she and her mother had quilted radiating lines across the large triangles in the quilt's "basket" pattern, and now I can compare my own amateur quilting stitches with the work of my ancestors. I can also now imagine how their hands made those stitches so many decades ago, pushing the needle through the fabric with the end of a thimble, carefully trying to make them as uniform as possible.

 

On the left: my great-great-grandmother's stitches On the right: my own modern stitches

We have  a wonderful family photo of my great-great-grandmother, Susanne Dalager (1858-1934) at her spinning wheel, engaging in another kind of women's work. She was an immigrant from Norway, and the quilt I have now was made for her daughter, Rose to keep in her hope chest for her wedding day.  Another picture shows her bidding farewell to her son, Rudolph, who was leaving the farm in Minnesota for a new life in California. They are pictures balancing her role as the mother of the family creating fabrics to keep everyone safe and warm, and the moment when she let them go to make their own way in the world. 

 

Left: My great-great-grandmother, Susanne Dalager at her spinning wheel. Right: Susanne bidding her son Rudolph farewell as he leaves the family farm for California. 

I knew my great-grandmother, Suzanne's daughter Rose Dalager-Huff (1895-1996), because she lived to be 100. I believe she helped her mother with the wedding quilt as a girl, but Rose was definitely a member of the rebellious 20's generation, so I never talked sewing with her.  She wore red "lip rouge," stuffed her bra with socks, and flirted with "the menfolk" in her thick Norwegian accent, right up into her 90's.  She also poured bacon grease into her bread and smoked most of her life, but took strange little puffs so that she never fully inhaled: apparently all behaviors key to living to the ripe old age of 100. She told me until the day she died that Ole Peterson was the love of her life. He was the father of my grandfather, who died in WWI before my grandfather was born and before they could be married.

 

Left to right: My great-grandmother, Rose Dalager, in the early 20th century with her sister Lillian; Rose with her son (my grandfather) in the 1920's; Rose in one of her favorite red pantsuit looks in the 1970's or 80's; Rose on her 100th birthday.

I can imagine these two different women making a quilt together: the domestic Sussane, and the rebellious Rose. I think of the patient (or maybe, sometimes, impatient) stitches that came before me as I embark on my own first full quilt project. It's a reminder that everything we create in our own lives is built on the creations of the people who came before us and that the new stitches are a part of a very old tradition.