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....