Dear Reader Column - September 27, 2022

Dear Reader,

Monday, the 26th, at midnight was the deadline for entering this year's Write a DearReader Contest. But the tropical storm and the hurricane have made it impossible for many readers to finish their entries. (I know my husband and I are exhausted from boarding up our 100 year old house.) So I'm extending the contest deadline to October 11th. Stay safe. 

You'll find all the contest info, including last year's winning entries at: http://www.dearreader.com/contest2022/index.html

Please welcome today’s guest author, Laurie R. King. She’s a NYT bestseller and MWA Grand Master, lives in a part of the world where the '60s linger on. It's also a part of the world that had a bizarre cluster of serial murders during the '70s. The two opposites form the basis for Back to the Garden, a cold-case investigation by Inspector Raquel Laing, who suspects that a back-to-the-earth 1970s commune may have been visited by a serial killer. 

Say “Hello” to Laurie at: [email protected]

Quilting a Story

Like many young women in the Seventies, I went Back to the Earth in all kinds of ways. I planted a garden, competing for zucchini with the deer and gophers. I meditated, went to lectures by Anaïs Nin and Alan Watts, learned to bake bread and bottle applesauce.

And I quilted.

Most women I knew sewed their own clothes--I didn't buy pre-made until I had kids, and even then, my store-bought things were in the minority. Any seamstress has a lot of scraps, which traditionally get turned into patchwork quilts. Not that my scrap-basket looked much like that of a pioneer woman--my wardrobe was bright--but quilting fit in with the hippie vibe, so quilt I did.

A quilt has two stages. First is sewing the pieces together, either by hand (I have a red-and-white quilt my mother pieced during WWII) or by machine. When the top is finished, it is fastened to a plain bottom layer, with warm filling in between. The easy way is to tie it--a heavy stitch here and there through all three layers. More ambitious is to quilt it, with all-over running stitches that follow the seams or make a pattern on their own. Because I needed to finish by the end of summer, I took a short-cut, alternating intricate pieced squares with plain and adding a generous frame around the sides. Each square was different, marked and cut around precise cardboard templates. The fabric was me over the years--this dress, that blouse--with solid colors for contrast. The sewing machine got a workout that summer, and must have been relieved when time came to put the squares together with longer seams.

Then came the quilting. I built a wooden frame, pinned the quilt into it, and got out my needle.

Unlike the old-days, when quilt frames were lifted out up to the ceiling with pulleys and ropes, mine needed propping in the corner whenever the room was in use. But I did finish my quilt by September. And I loved the story it told--still does tell, for those who can read it--about the clothing I wore, and the person I used to be. I've made and given other quilts since then, pieced from the scraps of baby rompers, tiny dresses, and the shirts worn by parents and grandparents: stories of who they used to be.

I will admit, however, that I no longer keep a quilt frame propped in the corner.

-- Laurie R. King

Say “Hello” to Laurie at: [email protected]

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]

This month's Penguin Classics book is Mr. President by Miguel Angel Asturias. I have a copy of the book to share with a lucky reader, so start reading and enter for your chance to win

Comments

[Storyteller Mary]

Beautiful work, much like telling or writing a tale. <3

[Marlis Manley Broadhead]

My grandmother--born in 1903--made a checkerboard quilt top--half the squares solid white and the other half comprised of squares made up from four fabrics each. It represented all the dresses she had made for herself and two daughters over the years. She gave the top piece to my mother to have finished. But my mother was killed in a car wreck at 48, and so it came to me. I was back in school getting my MFA, so it rested in a large drawer of fabrics.

Until my 11-year-old daughter found "the scraps" and cut out a pair of shorts--which never got finished because I went a little crazy. Everything got put into a box, and the unfortunate event told and retold over the years. When that daughter became engaged, my step-mother quietly took the too many pieces, saved those that were intact, and put the rest into a canning jar with a ribbon for a wedding present, telling us she was using the recovered pieces with new material to finish it up.

The first color she chose didn't work, so she bought more fabric, And time passed as it does. My parents aged, slowed down, and the quilt-that-never-was got carted off by an I've Got Junk truck after I had hurriedly purged their home for their resettlement into an assisted living apartment half a country away.

I think about those pieces, dresses, people with affection, remorse, and even a little shame. How I wish I could look through those random piles from two lifetimes once more before I hear the truck whoosh to a stop in the driveway, young men jumping out to unceremoniously remove things I mistakenly thought no one would ever care to see again.

[Nann]

I give a quilt history program called "Every Quilt Tells a Story." I ask people to bring quilts they own, whether inherited or a gift or made themselves, and we talk about the age, the design, and of course how the owners came by them. At one meeting two women brought the same quilt -- made from a commercially-produced kit in the 1960's. (Kit quilts are entire genre of the vintage quilt collecting world.)