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Excerpted Inspirations #186

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • Jul 14
  • 0 min read
[Mehetabel Elwell has always had a knack for patchwork, but doesn’t think much about it until one day an idea for a wonderful quilt pattern comes into her mind. She receives permission from her sister-in-law Sophia to start a new quilt in the pattern of her choice, and soon her life is transformed.] As she stood up with the others, the square fell from her trembling old hands and fluttered to the table. Sophia glanced at it carelessly. “Is that the new quilt you said you wanted to start?” she asked, yawning. “Looks like a real pretty pattern. Let’s see it.” Up to that moment Mehetabel had labored in the purest spirit of selfless adoration of an ideal. The emotional shock given her by Sophie’s cry of admiration as she held the work toward the candle to examine it, was as much astonishment as joy to Mehetabel. “Land’s sakes!” cried her sister-in-law. “Why, Mehetabel Elwell, where did you git that pattern?” “I made it up,” said Mehetabel. She spoke quietly, but she was trembling. “No!” exclaimed Sophia. “Did you! Why, I never see such a pattern in my life! Girls, come here and see what your Aunt Mehetabel is doing.” The three tall daughters turned back reluctantly from the stairs. “I never could seem to take much interest in patchwork quilts,” said one. Already the old-time skill born of early pioneer privation and the craving for beauty, had gone out of style. “No, nor I neither!” answered Sophia. “But a stone image would take an interest in this pattern. Honest, Mehetabel, did you think of it yourself?” She held it up closer to her eyes and went on, “And how under the sun and stars did you ever git your courage up to start a-making it? Land! Look at all those tiny squinchy little seams! Why, the wrong side ain’t a bit but seams! Yet the good side’s just like a picture, so smooth you’d think ’twas woven that way. Only nobody could.” The girls looked at it right side, wrong side, and echoed their mother’s exclamations. Mr. Elwell himself came over to see what they were discussing. “Well, I declare!” he said, looking at his sister with eyes more approving than she could ever remember. “I don’t know a thing about patchwork quilts, but to my eye that beats old Mis’ Andrews’ quilt that got the blue ribbon so many times at the County Fair.” Dorothy Canfield, “The Bedquilt” in A Harvest of Stories (1951), pp. 55-56 “Quilt Beginnings” artwork by Linda Simonetti Odhner [Continued next week]

 
 
 
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