D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April
2008
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Voice of a Ranch Woman Sixth in a Series |
Using Up the Scraps We Have
The surprise of quilting is that you wind up giving someone your heart, in the time you spend making a quilt.
By Linda McDonald, as told to Victoria Tester
This first-person reminiscence is excerpted from recordings of Linda Nielson McDonald at her home on the McDonald Ranch. Established in 1903, the McDonald Ranch is among the five oldest continuously working ranches in Grant County. Linda McDonald, born in Moab, Utah, in 1942, is the wife of Jerry McDonald, the son of Jonnie McDonald and Evelyn McCauley. These recordings are a collaboration between McDonald and author Victoria Tester, whose book Miracles of Sainted Earth (University of New Mexico Press) won the nationally recognized Willa Cather Literary Award. Their efforts mark the beginning of a project by the two women to record and publish a book of oral histories of ranch women in southern New Mexico.
My first recollection of quilts was when my grandmother, Lulu Josephine Green, my mother's mother, gave me several real old things she liked. One of the things she gave me was a crazy quilt, made by my great-grandmother, Alma Jacobs Parker. Alma was born in 1870 and died at a very young age, in 1907. So my mother never knew her.
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The quilt by the author's great-grandmother, Alma Jacobs Parker, circa 1905. |
But Alma had made this crazy quilt out of my great-grandfather's neckties. It has a real special square in it — a square she painted, because she was an artist. It has a beautiful rose and two yellow birds on it, painted with oils. Some of the fabric on this quilt is fabric that probably wasn't necktie fabric, but velvet. Then Alma put all these beautiful stitchings on each square, and there's also a square where my-great grandmother did some beautiful embroidery. This quilt was never made into a finished quilt, it's just a top, but I've been so grateful to my grandmother Lulu Rhinehart Green who gave it to me because I feel like it's tied me back to Alma. This quilt is a hundred years old, or more. And it's falling apart. It's disintegrating, some of it, which makes me really sad, because you want to keep these things forever. But they don't last forever.
Down through the 43 years Jerry and I've been married, we've come into possession of some special quilts here on the ranch. We have the quilt that was the Morton quilt. It's a cream color, a solid fabric, not a piece quilt. The quilting on it is about a fourth of an inch apart. The reason they did that quilting really close like that back then is because the batting was made out of cotton, and they wanted to hold the batting in place, and so they'd make that quilting really close to hold the batting in place so it wouldn't wad up. Nowadays, our batting is polyester, and you can hardly pull it apart, so it isn't as important that we do that really close quilting. But this Morton quilt, we figure, was made by Granny Evelyn McCauley's grandmother, Martha Jane Brewer Morton, who was born in 1862 and died in 1903. The quilt was reverenced by Granny's mother, Nancy Morton McCauley, who gave it to Granny. This was a special quilt to Granny McDonald, whose grandmother, like my own mother's grandmother, died at a young age, when she was just 41. This quilt is so special that we hardly ever get it out, but we did display it when Granny and Grandpa McDonald had their 50th wedding anniversary.
The other quilt we have here at the ranch is a friendship quilt made for Mitchel Ann Gordon, Jerry's great-grandmother, Jeremiah McDonald's wife, by the women in Virden when she lived down there. I feel very blessed to have this quilt, which was given to me by Jerry's Aunt Jane, Grandpa Jonnie McDonald's sister. Mitchel Ann died in 1932, so this quilt was probably made in the late 1920s, and each one of the gals in Virden made a pieced quilt square, and they embroidered their names on it. When you look at it you see all these old fabrics in it, and you just know that it's an older quilt, because it doesn't have any new fabrics in it. It has what they had. These gals made their quilt squares out of their scraps that they had in their own home, and they're not matched in any way. These kind of quilts are my favorite quilts. Because to me, that's what a quilt is. A quilt is to use up the scraps we have.
Another special quilt we have that was Granny's is one that Nancy Morton McCauley made when she went to the Shiff's Department store in Silver City and got wool samples. They had those wool samples there for people to pick out what kind of suit they wanted to order. So she got these wool samples. Evidently she made several of those Shiff's wool-sample quilts. The samples are only about three inches by five, and she sewed all those together. Now that is a lot of sewing on a treadle sewing machine!
Sometimes a woman doesn't quilt, but will hire someone else to make her quilts. Grandma Nancy Morton McCauley went down to Lordsburg to a lady who was living down there who did quilts. And Grandma Nancy had her make up a bunch of quilts so that she could give one to each of her nine children. Those were Lone Star quilts. Granny McDonald had Aunt Alice Gordon make up Lone Star quilts for Jerry and his sister Annalee. Granny didn't quilt, but she wanted her children to have these quilts, and so we've got Jerry's Lone Star quilt.
Granny gave me several other quilts when we got married and later I put a Log Cabin quilt on one of our kids' beds, and discovered that after we'd used it three years or so, it started to wear. And I go, "We can't wear this out!" A Log Cabin quilt is where they start in the middle with a little square, then they sew a piece of material to that and then another piece on the other side, and another straight rectangular piece on the other side, and then on the other side, until they've made a square. Anyway, I put that Log Cabin quilt away.
I told myself early on, "We're never going to use these old quilts because I don't want to wear them out." But I also go, "What's the purpose? The purpose of making quilts is to keep people warm, not to have in a cedar chest someplace!" We do that with a lot of things, don't we?
I made a compromise. I decided that when our kids got married, and they came back to the ranch for the very first time, that their bed would have the Lone Star quilt on it for them to sleep under. Then I would carefully put it up after they left and wait for the next marriage. So now all of our six children have slept under the Lone Star quilt.