My mom learned to quilt at her church craft class, probably when she was about 60. Together, with other women, they chatted and stitched in the church basement.

Donated materials were readily available for anyone to use in the member-stocked craft class supply cabinet with fabric brought into class left over from personal projects which crafters had worked on in their homes. It was a crafters dream opening those cabinet doors. Everything was free, a definite bonus. In 1997 my mom found 12 beautifully completed Dresden Plate quilting squares made with vintage cotton material ready to adorn a quilt that my mother decided to design. It was a fairly easy project since the most intricate parts of the quilt, the Dresden Plate blocks, were already completed, but she took great care in decorating the quilt with evenly spaced quilting stitches in an intricate pattern, all sewn by hand and completed by herself at home.

At a church dinner, at the cost of 25 cents for a lottery ticket, everyone had a chance to win the quilt which my mother made. The proceeds would be used to support a project in the church. This was an exciting after dinner activity and everyone held their breath as the winning ticket was drawn. Much to my surprise, I bought the winning ticket. I was ecstatic. My mother was mortified imagining that her fellow parishioners would think the drawing was rigged. It wasn’t and life went on and I went home with this treasure. Since I was in the process of moving, mom kept the quilt at her home, safely stored in her cedar chest with other family quilts.

The quilt was a gem, especially because it was the final quilt my mother would complete, and when I visited her in Pennsylvania, I would remove the quilt from her cedar chest and lay it on my bed. I could feel her arms around me as I snuggled in bed.

When she died at age 92, I took my quilt home to Forest Hills, but soon came to the realization that apartment living prohibited the addition of one more quilt. So, I gave it to my daughter, Krista, who was the keeper of many of our family quilts, including one from my grandmother. She used them all on her beds which is exactly where a quilt is meant to be.

Since that vintage material in the Dresden Plate pattern was probably about 70 years old when Krista received the quilt, add on another 10 years of bedtime use, the inevitable happened–the “plates cracked”. The material began to disintegrate. I repossessed the quilt and went into repair mode.

In my fabric box I found 8 quilt squares left over from a quilt project I had previously made for my daughter, Holly, and remarkably, they were made with the same color green that my mother used in her quilt to connect the squares.

I needed 12, but I improvised the corner blocks. So I went to work, covering the Dresden Plates with a more modern design and adding some hand quilting of my own.

A month later, when my project was completed, I laid it on the floor and sat on a chair to admire it. I cried. I thought of the unknown woman, probably a mother and grandmother herself, who made the Dresden Plates, now hidden beneath the updated quilt blocks. I could picture in my mind’s eye my mother sitting quietly in her home, patiently, with delicate stitches, adorning the plain material as her gentle hand created swirls and ovals with thread that became her signature. I saw my grandmother who quilted on a frame in a bedroom at the top of the stairs in her home, never conversing, just weaving the thread in a labor of necessity into a quilt that would bring her warmth. I quilted for beauty and my daughter, Krista, quilted for artistic expression. Quilting, in our family, is a tie that binds.