My mother-in-law’s apron

“I made quilts as fast as I could to keep my family warm, and as pretty as I could to keep my heart from breaking,” wrote one pioneer woman in her diary. Pioneer quilts were usually made from scraps – Pa’s britches, empty flour sacks and Meg’s outgrown coat. Many quilts told stories; you could read a family’s biography on them.

Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to quilting. I knew all about secondhand: most post-war immigrants pinched pennies till they squealed. In her letters to Holland after mom and dad immigrated to the Hamilton, Ontario area in 1949, mom wrote home to say that she’d been scouting auction sales and secondhand shops to pick up furnishings. She was thrilled when a local woman gave her a box full of children’s clothes. “We ‘poor immigrants’ can put those clothes to good use,” she wrote. She repurposed a brown velvet curtain into clothes to keep me warm in that drafty farmhouse.

I learned to sew at my mom’s knee, and have continued to sew since I made my first doll dress at age five. My love of sewing eventually led to making quilts as bed coverings or wall hangings for family and friends. That “hobby” stood me in good stead as our children grew up. I loved my day job as a freelance writer, but when the dishes were done and the children asleep, I sat at my sewing machine. There is a deep satisfaction in taking bits of cloth and creating something that nobody else will make exactly the same.

But, as happens often, I became restless in mid-life. The call to my career began fading and nothing was replacing it. One day, it came to me: I would combine my two joys – quilting and writing – to communicate the thing I cared the very most about: spiritual and personal growth. The seed of a dream was planted.

Stitching a dream

It took many years for that seed to bear fruit. We moved to Vancouver Island after 33 years in Edmonton. I created one small quilt every month to mark my progress learning to live in a new environment. I discovered that I could use little scraps of fabric like a painter uses paint. The following year, I created one 8×8-inch square each week to document turning 60. It wasn’t a bed quilt, in the end, but something that spoke of growing and changing as a child of God in this new home and new stage of life. It was the first step in fulfilling my dream.

In 2013, when I turned 65, I took the next big step: I launched a blog. I had been reading about the amazing intelligence and life skills of crows, and so I called my blog “CrowDayOne – words and images for the first day of the rest of your life.” To date, the blog has 250 posts of my quilts and written insights. Often I need both art and words to express my ideas adequately. Writing informs my art and vice versa. I call my process “work listening,” staying open to the Spirit’s work. It was as though I’d been waiting for 65 years to finally figure out what I was supposed to be doing. My studio overflowed into the guest room as I accumulated bins of fabrics and fibres often bought at secondhand stores; my head overflowed with ideas. An orange polyester shirt became a starfish; nubby yarns added texture to trees; an old curtain became a background to a vase full of tulips.

But life has a way of throwing curve balls. Last year our life came to a grinding halt while we waited for my husband Al to have surgery for a disintegrated hip and also have a pacemaker implanted to regulate his heart. The surgeon said he was not a good candidate for surgery; would I be a widow soon? I was distraught. I felt as though we were entering a new phase of life for which I was not ready at all. My head knew I could trust God, but my heart struggled.
And so I turned again to my art and writing. In the studio I started sorting through fabrics and found an old multi-coloured apron that had belonged to my mother-in-law.

I was reminded of her hard life.

My mother-in-law’s story

Born in 1906 on a farm in Holland, as a young girl my mother-in-law watched in horror as her farm burned down, killing livestock and horses. Later, as a young woman, she fell in love with a man who was “beneath her station.” Eventually she did marry him and they had a few years of happiness. But her second child, a girl, was still-born and had to be torn from her body. The baby was taken away, and there was no opportunity to mourn or grieve her. Then came World War II, fraught with danger, but she rose to the challenge by hiding those who were being sought by the enemy, even confronting collaborators and calling them out. Several years after the war, her dear husband died suddenly of spinal encephalitis.

Three weeks later, she gave birth to her fourth boy, my husband Al. A widow at 42, responsible for raising four children, she took in factory workers as boarders, up to 10 at a time, providing meals and doing the laundry on the weekend when they went home for a few days. When her oldest son, who had been handling the family shoe-making business, decided to emigrate with his wife, she declared, “Then we’ll all go.”

Those early years in Canada were difficult. Many times she must have thought, “This is not what I signed up for.” Compared to her, I have it easy. And yet she survived. What could I learn from this old apron, and from her life?

Art from life

The many colours in her apron symbolized the many facets of a life: red for power and strength; black for death and pain; yellow for sunshine and joy; green for growth; blue for peace; white for hope; grey for drudgery and hard work.

After pulling the apron to pieces, I used the bits of colour to create a layered path, highlighting the many themes that are the foundation of our lives. We all walk this path; we all have to find our way through hard things and move on. The dangling ends remind us that the work is ongoing.

What did Mom hang on to when she lived with all this turmoil? She never talked about it much, but she had a staunch Calvinistic faith, sturdy enough to hold her up. She was sure that she was not alone, that God was watching over her. That, as the Bible says, “All things work together for good . . .” And they did – she lived to see her “boys” thrive, and to hold her grandchildren and even great-grandchildren on her lap. As for me, the anxiety I’d been feeling was replaced with peace as Al went through surgery twice (and is doing well, now).

As a final touch, I added a traditional Mexican weaving, a medallion called the Eye of God. His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he cares for me. I need to remember this, because now, once again, we are living in a time of turmoil – war, conflict, tariffs, threats to democracy and much more. And once again, I am turning to writing and quilting to navigate my way.

Perhaps working with secondhand materials reminds us that what others have cast off is not waste. Beauty, peace and renewal may arise from the ashes.