What a fabulous picture and how neat that so many of you remember seeing these or have one!!!

[quote=
Thats an awfully nice looking barn.[/quote]

I had to go back and look! You could eat off the floor!!

This is the way my grandmother quilted her quilts.

My mother still quilts this way!

We had one of these in our basement when I was a little girl. My Great Grand and Mom would work when they had time or sometimes a group would come over and they would all sit chat and sew. (By Hand of Course)

Such a wonderful picture! I can remember my grandmother having one in her 'living room.' Of course, her living room had 2 rocking chairs and the only other furniture was a small side table with a big wooden, battery-operated radio (for listening to the war news or the 'Grand Ole Opry" on a Saturday night) and cane-bottom chairs brought in from the kitchen for people to sit on. The side of the kitchen table nearest the wall had a bench but the open side had the chairs at meal time. The only lighting in the rooms was from coal-oil lamps or light from the one window in each room. That quilt frame was pulled up when she wasn't quilting and down in the middle of the room when she could find the time to quilt. Of course, there wasn't much room around that frame either. Sometimes you were trapped until nature called and everyone had to get up to let someout visit the outhouse.

I think it's a great idea but I wouldn't be able to use the ceiling light if it was pulled up and I'm not sure my rooms are large enough to accommodate a full size quilt top with room for chairs and people to sit around it and be able to get up and move around it. If you all are like me, you have too much furniture in the room to get it all out of the way to make room for that kind of frame to be at a comfortable height.

Isn't it a mind-stretcher to see how our mothers and grandmothers were able to manage to do without so many of the conveniences we have today? Their workload was tremendous--washing in an iron pot over a fire in the back yard, hanging clothes on a line (or the fence) to dry, ironing with cast irons heated on a wood stove, gardening, canning a supply of food for the winter, milking and making butter, butchering chickens and hogs, cleaning squirrels and rabbits to cook supper, cooking everything 'from scratch'--no mixes or convenience foods, scrubbing wood floors, hauling water for drinking, cooking, and washing from a well (not always close to the house either)--and they still found the time to make all their clothes by hand and quilt the beautiful quilts that have survived to be loved so many years later.

It humbles me to know that I have life so much easier and find myself often complaining how I "don't have time" or I "don't have what I need" to do the things I want to do. I frequently have to stop and remember how it was when I was a little girl and recall how good God has been to me that I have the things I do have.

Thanks for the unexpected trip down memory lane. Now--back to quilting.

You recapped my grandmother's life (and for a while after WWII my mothers) exactly. I was born in 1944 and I remember life in rural Arkansas was very much like this until the mid 1950s. It was a perfect time to be a kid. Maybe not so perfect for adults.

My mother had this type frame the whole time I was growing up, and I had hers for a long time, finally had to replace them with new boards, I still have the hooks in my sewing room ceiling where I had the frames hanging. Had to take them down when I got the computer. Desk is quite large, so didn't have the room anymore. I love the memories of helping my mom quilt. She would quilt for people on her frames and charge $25. She would do the shell pattern, with a string and a piece of chalk tied on the end. She pieced and quilted all her life, the last couple of years she had to tie the quilts as her hands got crippled with arthritis. She lived to be 93 and I lost her in 2004; Still miss her everyday, and I have a lot of her quilts. Such sweet memories.

If you lived in a one room house this set-up would be a necessity! What an interesting picture.

My mother quilted on a fram like this and I did play underneath it. In the house I grew up in the only room big enough was the dining/living room. The frame hung over the dining room table, and had to be raised up for meals.