Finishing What Our Mother Started

Vintage quilt 50 years in the making

My mom could sew almost anything—prom dresses, bathing suits, wedding dresses. She made wedding and birthday cakes. She sewed dolls and hand-sculpted clay doll heads, which were cast in ceramic molds. She could paint. She could draw.

She also made quilts.

Mostly tied quilts and pieced baby quilts. But in the early 1970s, she started a full-sized pieced quilt. For most of my life, I only ever saw it in parts—blocks in a box, pieces spread across her sewing machine, fabric covering the kitchen table. Sometime after I left for college, she managed to assemble the entire quilt top. In the 1990s, my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and they moved to Utah. The quilt top was folded, packed away, and forgotten in a plastic bin.

When I visited my sister, we were playing our game of “Do you remember…” when she left the room for a minute and came back carrying a large plastic bin. I had no idea what was in it. She pulled out a pile of wrinkled fabric. I didn’t recognize it. But once it was spread across the floor, I remembered watching my mom work on it for decades. And there it was—still unfinished and tucked away. It made me unbearably sad.

I asked my sister if I could take it back to Utah and finish it. She said yes.

Once it was home, I knew I didn’t have the skill to do it myself. What was I thinking? I called my niece, a magnificent quilter, and asked what I should do.

“I never finish my quilts,” she said.

“But your quilts are always finished,” I replied.

“That’s because I pay people with long-arm machines,” she said. “You give them a quilt top, and they give you back a finished quilt.”

I had no idea this was a thing.

I went online and found one of these magical long-arm quilters. Her name was Shauna. I emailed her, explained my story, and a few days later brought my mom’s quilt top to her house. She pulled out books and quilts and showed me stitching options and backing fabrics, all of which went completely over my head. Finally, I admitted, “I’m not a quilter. I don’t even understand what you’re saying. I want it finished in a way my mom would have liked.”

She nodded and said she understood—and that she loved finishing vintage quilts.

I left my mother’s 55-year-old quilt top with a quilt-obsessed stranger, in a room full of beautiful quilts, and hoped for the best.

When I went back to pick it up, and Shauna laid it out on her floor, I cried. I was overwhelmed to see something my mom had started—finally made whole and beautiful—more than fifty years later.

When I delivered it to my sister’s house and laid it out on her floor, she cried too. My brother said he was overwhelmed as well. When your parents are gone, you don’t get to give them gifts anymore, but this felt like one—a gift from my sister and me to our mom.

The quilt is out of the plastic storage bin and hangs on my sister’s living room wall as a work of art.

It is finished—an inheritable treasure—and one her granddaughter has already claimed.