Be You Blithe and Bonny: Grammy and the Hand-Painted Quilts

Grammy Read (Lillie Belle Munroe Read, 1892–1992), like most of the women of her generation, did a lot of handiwork, crafting, sewing, knitting and crocheting, painting, and creating all kinds of things of beauty for her home.

There is no telling how many quilts she produced in her 99½ years of activity. (I suppose we should subtract the first five years, but I’m sure she probably started young! And of course she loved to knit and crochet, and she made many of those kinds of things over the years.) She loved quilt-making. It was something she was able to continue to do after she lost most of her eyesight in her 90s.

She gave me this baby quilt after my son was born and when it looked like he would actually live (he was very premature). She told my mother to tell me that the baby would be all right after all and that I was not to worry. I believed her and worried anyway, because that’s what I do in spite of everything. Anyway, it’s a treasured memento of my Grammy, with the Beatrix Potter figures on the front and the kittens on the back. Grammy knew that when I had studied in England one summer I had gone to the Lake District home of Beatrix Potter. Later on I studied Miss Potter’s life and works—the little books, the paintings, the incredible depth of scientific knowledge amassed by this home-trained girl and woman; her passion for the traditional farms, furniture, sheep, and stonework of the Lake District; and her far-seeing actions in bequeathing over 4,000 acres of pristine farms to the National Trust to keep them in perpetuity. I bought all the Beatrix Potter books with her original illustrations and read them to my son many times.

Grammy, Linda, and Barb

Grammy loved flowers of all kinds, and she began hand-painting flowers for quilt tops in the 1980s, I think. She may have started earlier, but I think it was not too much earlier. Somebody might know more exactly.

Her three youngest granddaughters were grown up and she began to worry just a little bit about when they would decide to get married. They seemed to be taking a long time about it. She told us, “The first one of you three that gets married gets a hand-painted flower quilt.” The contest was on, and Linda won pretty soon.

As a consolation prize, I got a single-sized hand-painted flower quilt. This one really shows off Grammy’s lovely handiwork. The flower colors are rich and varied; the surrounding border sets off the colors as if they are in a garden, and Grammy’s favorite yellow ties are like little sunspots dotting the garden ground. It is most fun to spot the duplicate flowers and then to examine them to see the differences she made in color and design.

At long last I decided to marry. (I wasn’t averse to the idea of marriage—but I had to find the right person!) Grammy got busy and made another hand-painted flower quilt for us. My mom said that she was having a harder time seeing to do the paintings, and one of my aunts usually sewed the pieces together for the tops. When Grammy tied the quilts, the ties no longer stayed in straight rows, but who was looking for that? Hers were beautiful quilts.

When my sister got married a few years later, Grammy made her last hand-painted flower quilt. My mother says that Grammy tried to do the sewing herself, and then because she had lost her central vision and had only peripheral vision left, the pieces weren’t quite together in all places. Grammy just tied them together when she tied the quilt. That would fix those stubborn seams and hold the danged thing together.

But because Grammy was above all things Scotch in her frugality, she watered down the paint to make it go further, and we think that is why my sister’s and my big quilts have faded almost to white. My mother says her quilt has faded away too, and she had rarely used it before putting it away. I am glad to have the one with the bright colors that shows what Grammy meant to do all along.

Do any of you have one of Grammy’s quilts? What does yours look like?