Three's a charm

Mom & I visited the Rose Hill Quilt Guild tonight for its monthly meeting. It's a smaller group than the guild we belong to, but it's a very active guild that is highly involved in charity projects. (Members have given 3,500 quilts to various community needs since 1997. I'm pleased to have played a very small part in that, and Mom & I picked up a few kits to work on more charity baby blankets.)


We really made the trek to Rose Hill to hear from the guest speaker, Patty Knoechel, who is the younger sister of famous quilter and author Eleanor Burns of Quilt in a Day. I found Patty to be an incredibly sincere woman. She spoke, for example, about how much she misses her husband of 30 years (he died earlier this year). She told great jokes and was a great teacher of different techniques.

The bulk of her presentation was about Eleanor's newest book, "Victory Quilts," which tells their family's story and includes quilt patterns and stories that tie in with the 1940s. It's an era of American history that I adore, and I appreciate many of the quilts, which include symbols that represent the WWII time period:


To date, I've made only one Quilt it in a Day quilt. It didn't take me a day. At all. If fact, I still need to sew on the binding for it. But it's a quilt I cherish because Mom & I worked on it one block at a time using replica Civil War-era fabrics. The book and quilt tell the story of blocks that supposedly helped guide American slaves to freedom. Historians and quilters alike debate whether this indeed happened or if it's merely a myth. When I studied the underground railroad in American history college classes (Lawrence, obviously, played an integral role in the underground railroad), I did find one piece of documentation of a slave writing that he knew he had reached a safe house because of a hidden message in a quilt draped across a home's porch rail. I wasn't even into quilting at that time in my life, but even then I suspected that quilts have played important roles in that part of Kansas and American history.

For now, I display the quilt on an antique ladder in my living room. (I spread it out on the floor for this photo.)


The highlight of tonight was that it's Mom's three-month anniversary from being released from the hospital. I thank God every day for her recovery and the fact that she's feeling well enough to talk me into adventures like the one we shared tonight. A little slice of serendipity: Mom won a door prize, a quilt pattern from Kansas Troubles Quilters called "There's No Place Like Home." Indeed.