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Grandma’s Quilting Bee
Tuesday, March 28, 2023 by Phyllis Kester
While still a young child in Oklahoma in the early 1940s, I often sat beside my maternal grandmother Hays as she and her lady friends gathered around a large room-sized wooden quilting frame and did the hand sewing on someone’s quilt. Since I was small and sat about eye level with the quilting frame, I watched with envy as their nimble fingers seemed to fly with their tiny precise stitches and ornate designs. On the other hand, I slowly and painfully labored as I attempted to match their small neat stitches on the section they assigned to me. More than once I added a bit of blood to the pattern as I impaled my finger with the sharp needle. This was because my right hand held the needle on top of the quilt and the left hand remained below the fabric to guide the needle “by feel” and to return the needle back up through the material to the top.
This was before cell phones and our small town had few landline phones at that time, so the local news passed swiftly around the quilting frame and was sprinkled with the counseling and advice that flowed among the ladies. But—the best of it all—was the panorama of lives, the value of acceptance and heritage that effortlessly unfurled before my wide-open eyes as I struggled to do my small part—somewhere between the loving and experienced hands around the quilt. They never shamed or scolded me for not doing as well as they did, but guided me and accepted my feeble efforts as a preschooler.
I was blessed by the love that flowed between and from these elderly quilters who lived God-fearing lives at a slower pace than their own grown children. The love and wisdom I absorbed from these saintly women were probably more valuable to me as a person than all the years of education, multiple degrees, and training that followed.
I inherited many hand-sewn quilts, such as the one pictured that was made from the dresses of my mother and grandmother. Whenever I look at them and the tiny hand-sewn pieces that were meticulously pieced together, I wonder about some of the differences in children growing up then versus now. In our present fast-paced world with all the accompanying entertainment and social media that swallows our time and entertains us to death, where is a young child given the opportunity to have lavished upon him or her the love, wisdom, and acceptance of an older generation—as I received at my Grandma’s knee and at her quilting bees?
Comments
Theresa Watson From At 3/28/2023 12:31:28 PM
Phyllis, thank you for sharing with us this delightful story. A tremendous experience and an example for the youth of today.Reply by: Phyllis Kester
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