Quilts played an integral part in my becoming a novelist. Early in my writing journey, I purchased a set of unfinished quilt blocks at a country auction, delighted by the colors (madder browns and rusts), amazed by the maker's skill (diamonds where the points MATCHED), and sad that the pieces hadn't ever been connected to make a quilt. I wondered why. In a fabric dating class, I later learned that those pieces predated 1867, the date when Nebraska became a state. How did they get here? Why weren't they ever finished? What story could they tell? Those musings played a role in the story of Jesse King, a woman traveling the Oregon Trail, and that story became my first novel, Walks the Fire.
The stories behind old quilts inspire me to study them and to help research the quilts in the collection at the International Quilts Study Center and Museum, where I'm a member of the Genealogical Task Force, comprised of five volunteers who delight in spending hours researching names and dates.
Some of the quilts in my personal collection suggest stories, too. Here are a few of the mysteries they represent to my overactive imagination ... and the answers I've found so far:
I purchased this quilt (left) at an antique mall in North Carolina, and while I don't know much about it other than the fact that the vibrant graphics appealed to me,I do think the maker may have lived on a farm. Why? The back is a walnut-dyed feed sack that once contained "Choice Virginia cornmeal." Was the quilt made in Virginia? Possibly. How did it get to North Carolina? Mystery.
It's not uncommon to find silk ribbons incorporated into Victorian crazy quilts. One of mine includes this ribbon that commemorates an "FE&MVRR" outing October 16, 1888. Research reveals that the Fremont Elkhorn
& Missouri Valley Railroad was established in 1869 Nebraska and often called "the Elkhorn." I imagine a Victorian lady taking the excursion and enjoying it enough that she kept the ribbon and added it to the crazy quilt.
And here's the last quilt mystery for this post. I wanted this quilt because of the elephant. Someone loved the
circus! Look at those blue eyes! But ... why has the embroidery been picked out of the block that spells NANY? Did someone leave the "c" out of the name Nancy and intend to fix it? Or did Nany do something terrible enough to make a quiltmaker want to remove his/her name from the quilt? (I used that idea in my novel The Shadow on the Quilt.)
Do you cherish something that suggests a mystery you'd like solved?
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Stephanie Grace Whitson's Keepsake Legacies series uses cherished keepsakes (a quilt, a charm string, and a small box of treasures) as a way of telling the story of three pioneer women.
In book one of the series, Sarah Biddle's patchwork quilt tells the story of her life, but Sarah's niece, Lorna, doesn't realize the stories Aunt Sarah told her were true.
