Handmade Quilts - Warm Quilted Memories

When I was growing up, we all had handmade quilts on our beds in the winter. We didn't have warm blankets until much later. Mother would order a bag of cloth scraps and use that material to make quilts. Her sister, Aunt Bob (Barbara) loved to piece quilts by hand. I remember my grandmother Smith usually had a quilting frame hanging from the ceiling in one of the bedrooms and she would sit for hours, quilting. Ladies would get together and have a "quilting bee" and help each other complete their quilts. I can remember mother attending a few of those when I was little. We would crawl underneath the quilting frame and play with our dolls or take a nap on the floor.


When I left home in Sept. 1952 to go to college at Troy State College, I bought a nile green cotton thermal  blanket to take to school. I really did miss my quilt I left at home. It was too large for the twin size bed in the dorm.


When Jim and I got married in Oct. 1953, my Aunt Bob gave us a quilt top that she pieced for me, using scraps from dresses she had made for me over the years. I recognized the fabric the minute I spread the beautiful Dresden plate quilt out on the bed to look at it. She told me to put it away and someday I could quilt it. Unfortunately I never learned to quilt (and didn't try because I don't like to thread needles!).


Thirty-five years later when we were living in Haleyville, AL , Aunt Bob came to visit us. She asked where the quilt was that she had made for me. I took it out of my cedar chest and she was disappointed that I had not quilted it. She took it home with her and got it quilted by a group of ladies at a church in Elba.


I proudly display my "patchwork" heirloom quilt, folded at the foot of our bed on top of a chest. I have shared with our grand- daughters the history of the quilt. I've even helped some of them make small quilts, using the sewing machine to piece the fabric.


I made James a quilt for his 50th birthday in 2006 and it is now a wall hanging in his bedroom, over his bed. I used the computer to copy pictures and transfer them to the cotton squares. Then I put the squares together with solid strips of cloth. I threaded about a dozen needles at the time and stuck them in a pin cushion and set about "quilting" around the squares. He loves his train quilt (most of the squares relate to his hobby of trains.


When I get too old to drive, or work in the yard, I will take up quilting. I might have to get someone thread my needles for me. You can purchase quilt pieces already cut out and ready to sew into a pattern. It's much easier now than when Aunt Bob made my lovely quilt. And you can have yourquilt quilted on a quilt machine these days. No more quilting frames hanging from the ceiling!  

Sights, sounds and smells

Today I was thinking of certain things I like to smell. What brought this to mind was when a neighbor told me his native azaleas (honeysuckles) were beginning to bloom and immediately I remembered the sweet smell of those honeysuckles that grew in the woods when I was growing up on the farm. In the spring we would gather some and bring inside and the house smelled so good. Soon after the honeysuckles bloomed, we would go back to the woods and get limbs of wild sweet shrubs with the tiny little brown flowers that smelled almost as good as the honeysuckles. We would wrap one of the little sweet shrub pods in the corner of a handerchief and tie it and then put it in our pocket and take it out during the day to smell the sweet scent.


There were also wild honeysuckles vines that grew along the fences. I can remember coming home from church revival meetings in the summer, riding on the back of our daddy's big truck, and the heavy damp evening air would smell so good as we passed the honeysuckle vines on the way home.


I think my favorite "smell" is when I put fresh linens on the bed and turn back the covers at night and I am greeted with the smell and feel of the fresh linens. I miss my outdoor clothes line at the farm where I would dry bed linens and they would flap in the breeze and feel so good when I put them back on the bed.


I love the aroma of pies and cakes baking, especially if they have spices in them. Nothing can beat the taste of good gingerbread. I even like to smell onions and green peppers cooking, and bacon.


Years ago I remember opening up the new Sears catalog, and how the new pages smelled. And I remember how new leather shoes smelled when you took them out of the box. I am having difficulty smelling things during the heavy pollen season since my sinus passages are clogged.


Some of the sounds I like are trains in the background. When we lived in Minnesota, the sound of the Burlington Northern train coming around a curve back of our house, blowing the whistle at the crossing at the end of our street. I especially loved this sound when it was snowing and blizzard weather. I felt that everything was going to be ok if the train was still able to get through all that bad weather! I love the sound of farm animals late in the afternoon and early in the morning. We never needed an alarm clock since the roosters started crowing at daylight. I love the mourning dove calls and the whipp-o-will calls. And the sounds of little biddies (baby chicks) when they arrived in big boxes in the spring. The mailman delivered them and we placed them in the brooder until they were large enough to be outside.


And perhaps most of all, I love soft pretty music.


My favorite time of the day is late in the afternoon when the sun is sinking and the air becomes hazy or in the winter observing the purple and orange sky in the west. Sometimes I say to myself, another day has come and gone and let us rejoice that all's well with us.

Elba Town Square and Court House

Driving up a hill and getting to the top and looking out over valleys is another sight I enjoy. I have this feeling every time I come into Elba from the east and come down the steep hill into town. You can see the little town nestled at the bottom of the hill along Pea River. The church steeple and clock on the court house tower welcome you to our sleepy little town.


I like the sight of new crops coming up in the fields in the spring, remembering how excited my dad would be when his peanuts, cotton and corn would push up out of the dirt every spring.


I'll probably think of more to add later. I hope my sinus problems clear up before our roses start blooming. I would hate to miss that sweet smell.

New Geranium

My 10-year-old geranium 

When we moved to our present home in Elba in Nov. 2003, I brought a geranium with me that I had at the farm for 6 years. It bloomed all summer and I would move the geranium inside a storage building in Jan and Feb when we would have freezing weather. When we moved to Elba it occupied a place on the front porch and got afternoon sun from the southwest. Last summer during our drought, the high temperatures and dry weather conditions caused the plant to deteriorate before the end of the summer and it died. I had to throw it away in November 2007.

Red-orange blossom on my new plant

Today I stopped by a local nursery for their plant sale and guess what! I found another geranium just like my old one and I only had to pay $10 for it. I'm going to repot it in a bigger pot and keep it in partial shade on the back patio. One thing about geraniums, they are almost drought resistant and not like petunias and impatients that have to have a lot of water. The plant I bought today has 7 big blooms and about 20 buds ready to open up soon. I am so proud of my new plant. It is sitting on the outdoor table, right outside our breakfast room table where i can see it at any time.

Getting such a big plant home was no easy task since we were in the family car and not the van. I suggested James hold it in his lap for the short ride home, and he refused to have a flower pot in his lap! So... I put groceries in the floor of the back seat and put cereal boxes on top and used the "shelf" to place the pot in the back seat. We made it home without any problems. It was too tall to put in the trunk of the car, and besides I already had 2 big bags of potting soil in the trunk.

My new plant

I love to go to plant nurseries. We're lucky to have a nice one in Elba. I had to fight the urge to buy lots and lots of plants today. Beautiful hanging baskets as well as potting plants. I'm sure I'll be going back in a few days to take another look, and go in the van with plenty of room to haul anything I might not be able to resist!

Antique Roses in our yard

This photo was made today, March 27, 2008, after I weeded the flower bed and added pine bark mulch.


This antique rose can be traced back to Savannah, GA, in the early 1800's. An 80-year-old friend in Albany,GA gave me a cutting from her rose bush to root in 1992, and I have rooted dozens and given them away. My friend said she got a cutting from her great grandmother's homeplace in Savannah many years ago. That's how old it is.


I rooted 5 rose bushes when we moved to our present home in 2004. Can you believe these 5 big bushes were 12" cuttings only 4 years ago. They are just beginning to leaf out.


In this photo you see the same bushes in bloom on May 1, 2007. They look like cabbage roses when they open up, and smell so sweet. The stems are covered with "fierce" thorns that can really stick you.


The third photo is a close up of the flowers in bloom last May. I like to cut bouquets and give them away and also place some inside our house.


And the nicest part about these roses are that I am reminded of my friend Sara who is now 96 and living in Jupiter, FL. We got to know her very well during a flood in Albany, GA in 1994 when we were assigned (by our church) to help her with her flooded house, etc. Her husband had died just 3 months before the flood and they had no children. We spent about a year helping her get her beautiful home restored, filling our paper work, etc. She was a golfer and played regularly until the flood and the death of her husband.


So you see why I smile when I look at the roses in bloom and memories of my friend come back to me.

Weeds are popping up all over!!

I don't know how they manage to grow and survive the cold, freezing temperatures but we have a "bumper" crop of weeds this spring. Jim sprayed with weed killer to try to rid the lawn of some of the weeds, but new ones have come up since he sprayed. I took advantage of the nice, cool weather today to divide hostas, pull weeds in flower beds, and prune some vines that died during the winter. Jim thinks it's remarkable that I know where every flower in our yard came from, when and where I got them and all about the characteristics of each particular flower or shrub. After all, I am a certified Master Gardener!

We got rid (dug up) our monster banana bush and planted an azalea in its place. Planted an Orient pear tree in our "orchard" at the back of the yard. Cleaned the bird bath and added water. It was a sunny warm afternoon and there were so many birds splashing in the bird bath today. It's fun watching them and there were so many different ones. My favorite is the little blue bird and we have some nesting already in the back yard.

I bought a "weed book" to help me identify weeds. Now I have go find out what to put on them to kill them and when to apply the chemicals needed. Mostly we just mow them down. Our bermuda grass lawn is so late turning green that we need the weeds to have green in our yard.

I wanted to share something with you tonight so I will post some photos of weeds in our yard. See if you recognize any of them.  

#1 - henbit
#2 - wild onions

#3 - dandelion
#4 - wild geranium

Easter Sunday March 23, 2008

L TO R: Nerissa, Katie, Caroline, Nell, Jim, James, and Bill Gilmer

We took a trip to NC and SC during Easter and it was very cold. I'm glad we added jackets as an after thought when we were packing spring clothes.

We had fun visiting with relatives and seeing our granddaughters for the first time in almost 3 months. They were in England during Christmas holidays. One is in college, one is a Jr. high school and one in the 6th grade. They are sweet and beautiful young ladies and are very smart. In this photo they are hugging each other as the older sister is getting ready to head back to Clemson, a long drive. She wasn't happy about leaving her family behind since she had been with them for 10 days during spring break from school.

Nerissa, Katie, Caroline

Palm Sunday at our church today

Elba United Methodist Church http://www.elbaumc.org/

Today we attended Palm Sunday services, morning and evening, at Elba United Methodist Church were we are members. It was a nice sunny day and flowers are blooming everywhere.

As we stood to sing "Hosanna", the little children started coming down the aisles of the church waving palm branches and placed them at the base of the large cross on the left side of the front of the sancuary. The dark black cross has been in the church since the beginning of lent, and is draped with a bright purple length of cloth. On Easter Sunday, the children will again march down the aisles of the church and place fresh bouquets of flowers at the cross, completely covering the front part of the cross. Easter lilies will be placed along the railing in front of the altar. I am posting a picture for last year of the lilies. We won't be here for Easter this year since we plan to visit Jim's mother in NC on Thurs and Fri, and on to SC to our son Bill's Fri. afternoon for the week-end. We will attend the catholic Easter mass on Sunday with Bill and family.

One of my favorite Easter's was in 1986 when we were living in Haleyville, AL (Winston Co. in north Ala, near the Bankhead Forest). We bought a large house in the country near the forest and there was a small lake on the east side of the house. We had only been there about 4 months. Several of my family came to visit us that Easter. We decided to have an Easter sunrise service near the small lake, under the big oak trees with azaleas and bulbs blooming all around. I invited nearby neighbors (many I had not met) to come share with us and have breakfast. Several showed up, either walking or riding bikes, and some came in cars.

We had met a retired Methodist minister earlier and invited him to come and be our speaker. He was confined to a wheelchair and he and his wife joined us for the service. Rev. Gus Buttram lived in the Bankhead forest and had a camp meeting facility there where people came every summer. His sister lived nearby and helped cook meals there. They became our best friends. Gus had a brother in California that used to play Mr. Haney on Green Acres (Pat Buttram). We never got to meet him.

Back to our sunrise service- my nephews Andrew and Alex, made a cross our of some lumber and planted it in the ground. Andrew insisted that we drape the cross in purple, a royal color. I managed to find some purple cloth for him to use. They gathered fresh flowers and placed at the foot of the cross. We sang some Easter songs and then Mr. Gus read the Bible and talked about Jesus' rising from the dead, etc. What a beautiful service. It was cold and we really appreciated the hot coffee and homemade biscuits with ham and sausage after the service. My sisters prepared the food and we had a table in the garage where we served breakfast. This is a good way to get to know your neighbors.

After lunch we all gathered around the little pond and were soaking up the warm sun and some of the kids fishing and running about. Our neighbor's son passed by on his way to visit his parents (next farm over) and asked his mother about the new neighbors. He said they were lying ourdoors, all over the place. She had been at the breakfast and explained to him that they were visiting the Gilmers, and not all were living there!