Every Quilt Tells a Story
This is my version of Quiltville’s 2024 Mystery quilt called ‘Old Town’, inspired by Bonnie Hunter’s visit to Poland.
All of my grandparents grew up in small Polish villages, known in Yiddish as ‘Shtetls’ by the Jews who lived there for 500 years until the Second World War. Think Fiddler on the Roof.
Though the stories I heard from my grandparents about Poland mostly dealt with the brutality and horror of the Holocaust, I wondered if the sights, sounds and smells that inspired Bonnie’s design would have been familiar to them from their youth.
And so I decided to make this quilt to honour those who lived, worked, laughed and loved in the Shtetls for generations before the darkness fell.
I hope they are proud of me.
And I hope Bonnie forgives me for renaming my quilt the Shtetl Quilt.
Interestingly, the first clue dropped on the day my granddaughter was born. Maybe one day I will gift it to her as a reminder that we are all just a link in a chain.