Scotties for Stephen
Yesterday I took this quilt off the frame. it has embroidered letters of the alphabet and numbers in the white spaces; and all of those squares have mitered corners all perfectly done. Mom pinned a note to one of her completed quilts—“I signed up for a class on making mitered corners but the teacher didn’t know how. I decided I could teach quilting.” She had a loyal local following for many years and taught in the community room in the small town of Eastman.
It is the last one of the over twenty some for my mother’s grandchildren. She died in the summer of 2000 and it has taken me this long to complete them all.
Don’t judge me–there have been a few bends along the road.
Mom had always taken care of all the financial things; my Dad managed by going to the bank to ask how much money he had and then spent accordingly. They both had separate bank accounts with the same bank and labeled the same way—what a nightmare to figure out as I had to check just the account number on every transaction. That plus Mom had not been able to do the banking/billing for the past nearly year of her life left a big mess—plus I then took over Dad’s bills—he lived in Wisconsin and I in Texas–I made that drive nearly every month for over a year while working full time.
At that time, the grandchildren were mostly pre-teens and just barely teens—these were supposed to be wedding gifts—and I did not have a longarm quilting machine–just my well-used and loved Pfaff 7570. While I did quilt some good sized quilts on that machine, ti was not fun dealing with the basting and wrangling all that fabric.
I had one quilt professionally quilted but that person decided she really did not like quilting for others–and after a time I was able to buy a Gammill quilting machine—I named her Vivian after my grandmother. Basting is no longer a chore—-and now I baste everything larger than a standard sheet of paper—it’s just so easy and everything is so wrinkle free.
Now I have completed all of those quilts. Five are not married but their quilts are done—well, almost. I still have to put binding on this one and label it and the previous one. These were huge quilts–this one is 86 by 89; the previous one was 93 by 108 which were a challenge given the size of my frames.
Here it is quilted:
Sylvia Weir Art 
Wow!