Motherly Love

Here's a secret I don't often share: I sometimes think I am a terrible mother because my daughter is 17 and I STILL have not made her a quilt! Granted, I haven't been quilting all that long and while she's had plenty of doll quilts to play with over the years, she doesn't have a big quilt for herself. Oh dear, how can that be, what have I been doing? Have I been that busy? She'll be going off to college later this year. How time flies . . . .

I was able to sneak in a college quilt for my son while working on Remembering Adelia. I remember being VERY stressed trying to get everything done for the book plus an extra quilt, too, before he left. All a blur now. We've been planning a quilt for my daughter to take with her when she goes away to school.

One of the schools she is thinking of attending (still undecided) is located in a town that played a prominent role in the Underground Railroad movement and the campus has strong ties to the Civil War and anti-slavery activism. This historic campus building below was the site of one of the Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates in 1858.

Imagine - Lincoln sat in this very chair too . . . .

I am letting her plan her quilt the way she wants it. She fell in love with the Soldier's Cot quilt in my new book The Civil War Sewing Circle while I was making it. But she really loved the pinks and browns in the little Shoo Fly Quilt in the same book. I am trying to get her involved in making this quilt as much as possible. She's not always crazy about my fabric choices for my quilts and tries to advise me. Last week she looked through my fabric and picked out a lot of reproductions prints in pink and brown for her quilt. Made me so happy! Of course, 1800s repros is pretty much all I have, LOL, so there wasn't much choice. But still, I offered to take her shopping for others. I went shopping myself and brought home a few more prints I thought she would like and started cutting out the pieces last week.

I fell in love with Jo Morton's brown Luminaria prints and when I showed them to her she did too. I knew she would.  Look, they almost glow!

Rough sketch. I downsized the blocks to be a bit smaller than the ones in the book - 9" x 9". I'll let her pick out her borders.

I made a few scrappy blocks already. Aren't these sweet?

My daughter is an avid animal lover and I thought about somehow incorporating that into her quilt but she's too old for most of the "kiddie" prints out there. And I don't really have any animal prints in my repro collection -  EXCEPT for this Classic Conversational print of "kitties" designed by Judie Rothermel for Marcus Brothers from a few years ago. She loved  it for a background on some of the blocks and I just ordered a similar print with doggies on it. Perfect!

When I made a quilt for my son, I used rich fabrics mixed with darker prints because that was his style and it was HIS quilt, after all, not mine. It needed to be simple and also practical, to stand up to use - like a quickly  made quilt for a Civil War soldier going off to war, my son was prepared for the college battlefield.

If she decides to attend this school with such a rich history, how fitting to have a quilt to bring along made from Civil War-era fabrics.

Soldier's Cot Quilt

Like many quilters who have daughters, I often think it would be so nice if she shared my quilting passion. Selfish, I know, but hey, I think she'd have fun too. She's very good with color. I've tried to encourage her to learn to quilt many times but she tells me "That's YOUR thing Mom, not mine." If I can't teach her to quilt, how do I pass on the tradition in my family? Is it enough of a legacy to just make a quilt for her? If I don't teach her, the quilting tradition that began with me in our family will also die with me, and that makes me sad. I do know there's still time and quilters I meet always tell me their own daughters came around eventually, some in their twenties and thirties. Perhaps someday, after college, she'll come to me and say "Mom, will you teach me how to make a quilt?" I can only hope. And, if not quilting, at the very least I'll have passed on the legacy of motherly love.