Chasing Hawk

Watching my Mom sit in a corner of the living room. She was embroidering different stitches on a crazy quilt made up of all our old clothes. With 5 kids she had enough scraps for a king size quilt. Each square she made was with bleached cloth baby diapers as the batting. My youngest brother Bill was the first of us to use disposable diapers. She had saved the ones she used for my little sister a couple of years before for the batting. I wish I had gotten my mitts on that quilt, I have no clue where it is now.

ShirlinAZ

I can't remember Not having quilts. There were quilts on the beds, quilts to make forts with, and quilts for picnics. The men used quilts to make bedrolls for hunting trips. By the time I was 5 I was using scraps from Mom's sewing to make quilts for my dolls. To me a house is not a home without quilts.

LITTLEOLDME

My first memory of quilts/quilting is my Mom and neighbor women having quilting get together working on one quilt . all sitting around the quilting frame just talking and sewing.

roserips

My mother and Dad playing with me and my two sisters in the living room. They had a sunbonnet sue quilt and one at a time we would lie down on the quilt then they would fold it over us and take the ends then swing us back and forth it was a lot of fun and I only remember doing it the one time but I was fascinated by the applique girls. Later just before my eighth birthday my grandma made quilts for me and my sister. I got to pick mine first and I loved it for many, many years. My grand mother would piece the quilts and grandpa would tie them. She insisted that they be tied every 1 1/2 to 2" so they looked tufted and that is why they lasted so long. I was about 45 when my quilt finally want to quilt heaven and took all the upcycled fabrics with it since grandma only used old clothing to make her quilts.

romille

A Dresden Plate quilt, made by one of my grandmothers, that somehow found its way to our house. I was very young and only have vague memories of it, but I remember being intrigued by the different fabrics of the blades. It had white background behind the plates, with a country blue sashing between the blocks. The plates had creamy yellow center circles, and the plates were all stitched down with a blanket stitch in a thick black thread.

SueSew

Never saw a quilt growing up... Blankets and cotton bedspreads.

Can't remember how I even got the idea to make one 31 years ago for my daughter - I must have seen one in a baby boutique or a magazine.

Possibly working many years for long hours and filthy conditions for low pay as a weaver in the textile mills put my grandmother off from wanting to make things with fabric. I'll never know, but she didn't do much with the old treadle, and she was long retired when I came along.

sak658

I'm sure there were quilts around when I was very small, but the first quilt that I remember my mom was doing turned out to be a very sad situation....My mother had a quilt in the frame in the middle room of this long shotgun house that we lived in, I had just turned 9 years old.... and my youngest brother was around 14 yrs old and had been down the road playing with neighbors boys, and came home because he had ripped his jeans he had on....It was the 9th of August, 1951... My mother was taking cotton and spreading it out thin and laying it on the lining of the quilt.. My brother ask her if he could help and she told him, No son, he would get it too thick and she wouldn't be able to quilt it.. There was a chest of drawers near by and he turned around and picked up a kitchen match, and like boys would do, he flicked the head of the match and it lit and flew up and came down in the middle of my moms quilt....that old house had low ceilings and walls and ceilings were wall papered....the flames caught the cotton on fire then it caught the ceiling on fire...My baby sister was just a year old, momma picked up up and ran to the back porch and set her down on the ground, on the back porch was the pump to get water. The pump had to be primed, by the time my momma got a bucket of water and came back in, the fire was already in the next room which was the kitchen...she went back out and picked up my sister and ran across the road where I and my other sister was at the neighbors...She had washed that day for us and my paternal grandparents and the fire went down the clothesline and burned up all our clothes...my brother was running around hollering, "Momma, I didn't mean to do it" we knew he didn't mean too...
Momma had canned close to 100 or more jars of food out of the garden that year and you could hear them all popping and the butane tank blew up and that's what caught the clothes on the line on fire...but we all survived..
That is my first memory of a quilt. But that didn't stop momma from making quilts, she made quilts till she was 91 years old and I have so many of her quilts...and I am following in her foot steps...love my piecing and making quilts...Lost my mom in 2004 and miss her everyday.....

Sorry, didn't intend to write a book....

madamekelly

I remember the first quilt I ever saw. I was fifteen, and a student assistant in a kindergarten class. At the end of the year, the teacher was retiring because she was terminally ill. On the last day of school she brought me a gift to say good bye. When I opened it, it was a gorgeous red and white pineapple quilt! I was floored that she gave me such a gift. (All I gave her was a silly glass apple paper weight!). That night, our St. Bernard was shot with an arrow by a neighbor. My dad grabbed the quilt off of the couch, wrapped it around the dog an headed to the vet hospital. "Ben" did not survive, and I could not bear to have the quilt touch me knowing it had been covered in his blood. I gave it to the lady next door. Soon after, my dad remarried to a woman whose mother was a prodigious quilter. She is the lady who taught me to make quilts. Thank you Grandma Helen. I recently inherited all of her Christmas fabric, and am currently looking for just the right pattern.

Rose_P

There are some amazing stories on this thread so far. I'm glad you are sharing them. Mine is pretty mundane. My grandmother and aunt worked on quilts together as far back as I can remember, and I also remember being fascinated by all the fabrics in the quilts on the beds in their house. Grandmother died when I was 9, and I don't know what happened to all her quilts.

WMUTeach

Although both of my grandmothers used the needle and treadle machines, one only my garments and household items like towels and aprons. The other made me dresses of feed sacking but I recall sleeping with her in a big old dark wood bed that had a quilt on it when I was about 4 or 5 years old. I never saw her make a quilt. As time passed, she left us. I asked my aunt for a single quilt block that was left in her sewing basket. I have no idea why I did not ask for the quilt itself. I have that single block put together by hands. Just two triangles put together to make a diamond. Never forgot this quilt made of multitudes of feed sack diamonds and I am guessing some old shirts and dresses. She was a young mother during the depressions days and I suspect this was her attempt to warm her family. I do not have her quilt but I am now in possession of her treadle machine. At this time, it does not work but it means much to me. I hope to someday make a diamond quilt on her machine. I know I will be tears as I remember this dear woman of strength, wisdom and compassion who plowed with a team and sewed with her needle.