“Then you’re all set there too. The only problem seems to be needle-turned appliqué.” As the woman returned the notebook, her face brightened. “If you like, I could teach you during free time.”
For a moment Julia was rendered speechless. “You would do that for me?”
“Sure. I’ve never won any ribbons for my appliqué, but I can at least give you a crash course in the basics.”
Julia gratefully accepted. She could hardly believe her good luck when the woman, who introduced herself as Donna, offered to begin tutoring her right after class. And although she looked puzzled when Julia asked her not to reveal to anyone that she wasn’t already an expert quilter, she barely even flinched when Julia asked her to sign a confidentiality agreement to make certain of it.
Five years later, Donna still enjoyed teasing her about that confidentiality agreement, and Julia was still embarrassed that she had asked. It was hard to imagine now why a binding agreement had seemed so necessary then.
Because although she didn’t realize it, she and Donna were poised at the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Donna’s appliqué tutorials were the first step. Then, the next day, the friendly white-haired quilter from Quick Piecing knocked on Julia’s door by mistake while searching for another camper, Megan, whom Vinnie hoped to introduce to her newly single grandson. When Vinnie learned that Julia planned to eat lunch alone in her room, she insisted that Julia accompany her to the banquet hall for the legendary, absolutely-not-to-be-missed made-to-order pasta buffet. Julia soon found herself enjoying a surprisingly excellent dish of al dente penne with sun-dried tomatoes, fresh basil, and extra-virgin olive oil withVinnie; Megan, the camper Vinnie had been searching for when she knocked on Julia’s door; Vinnie’s other new friend, Grace, who had riveted Julia with her moving confession at Candlelight about longing for creative inspiration; and Donna herself, who looked just as surprised to see Julia pulling up a chair at their table as Julia was to find herself there.
As the days passed and they shared confidences and encouragement in quilting lessons and late-night chats, the new acquaintances stitched together a friendship unlike any Julia had ever known. They had all come to Elm Creek Quilt Camp seeking an escape from problems back home, and they had found in one another the mutual support and understanding they needed to return to their daily lives with renewed confidence to overcome whatever troubled them. On the last day of camp, the thought of bidding one another farewell and scattering across the country never to meet again was so heartbreaking that they vowed to return the same time the following year to enjoy another magical week of quilting and friendship together.
And so they had done, every year since.
The Cross-Country Quilters had become Julia’s most cherished friends, her most trusted confidantes. Julia knew she could safely confess the secrets of her heart to them, for they would listen without judgment and offer whatever comfort or insight or counsel they could.
If the Cross-Country Quilters couldn’t help her figure out a way to keep her cast and crew together and saveA Patchwork Life, then it simply wasn’t possible—and Julia refused to believe that was so.
4
On the last day of quilt camp in August 1999, the Cross-Country Quilters had lingered on the cornerstone patio after the Farewell Breakfast and show-and-tell, reluctant to say goodbye. Soon Julia would be returning to Southern California, Grace to San Francisco, Vinnie to Cincinnati, Megan to Dayton, and Donna to Silver Pines, Minnesota, a small town about an hour north of the Twin Cities. Their only consolation was their promise to one another that they would reunite the following year. In the meantime, they would stay close through regular phone calls, letters, and emails.
But Donna’s smile suddenly turned crestfallen. “People always say they’ll keep in touch, but they usually don’t.”
“We’ll be different,” Vinnie declared.
Julia wanted to believe them both, but experience had taught her skepticism. They might leave Elm Creek Manor with the best of intentions, but as the weeks passed and they fell into the patterns of ordinary life, they might forget how special their week together had been. If they failed to nurture their friendship, it might become nothing more than a fond memory, something to reflect upon and cherish when leafing through an old scrapbook rather than something vibrant and alive.
“We need a symbol, something to remind us of our promise,” Donna mused aloud.
“I know,” Vinnie exclaimed. “Let’s make a challenge quilt.”
“A what?” Julia asked. As far as she was concerned, every quilt was a challenge.
“A challenge quilt,” Vinnie repeated emphatically. “We’ll take a piece of fabric and divide it into equal shares. We’ll each piece a block of our choice from it, and next year, we’ll meet at camp and sew our blocks together to make a sampler.”
“The challenge comes from being required to use a particular fabric rather than being free to choose whatever you like,” Grace explained for Julia’s sake. “But sometimes there are other restrictions. Should we have any?”
“How about this?” said Megan. “We can’t begin our block until we take steps to solve our problems back home. That will keep us from procrastinating.”
In the months that followed, the challenge quilt spurred them to persevere even when confronting their personal issues proved easier said than done. When they reunited at quilt camp the following August, they were so pleased with their first challenge quilt that they promptly began another, but without the requirement that they resolve major life crises before beginning their blocks. The next year, Vinnie and Donna proposed making an elaborate Twelve Days of Christmas appliqué quilt, but Julia and Megan balked, so they decided to make a holiday-themed row round robin instead, using red, green, gold, and white fabrics and a variety of star patterns and other blocks suited to the festive season. For this style of quilt, which Julia particularly enjoyed, one quilter began by sewing a row of blocks of her choice, which she then passed along to the next quilter. The second quilter would add a row and pass it along, and so on, until every quilter in the group had added as many rows as they needed to make a finished top.
By this time, the Cross-Country Quilters had discovered thatsharing custody of the finished pieces was rather complicated, so the following year, they switched to creating their own interpretations of the same pattern rather than working together on a single quilt. Currently they were working on their most challenging project by far, reproductions of an exquisite antique sampler called Harriet’s Journey.
The story behind the quilt was as fascinating as the quilt itself was beautiful.
In 1987, future Elm Creek Quilter Maggie Flynn was walking home from the bus stop after work when she passed a garage sale and discovered a sampler quilt being used as a tablecloth for a glassware display. Although she was no expert, one look told her that this quilt, despite its dusty, disheveled appearance, was a remarkable find. The homeowner was astonished by Maggie’s interest in the bedraggled old sampler, which she had kept in her garage since moving to the neighborhood twenty-six years before. Her mother-in-law had bought it at an estate auction, and when she tired of it, she had given it to her son to keep dog hair off the car seats when he took his German shepherds to the park.
“We were just using it to hide an ugly table,” the homeowner said, bemused. “If you’re sure you want it, I guess I’ll take five bucks for it.”
Maggie gladly paid.
She took the quilt home, where she examined it carefully and discovered that despite the years of ill treatment, the sampler of one hundred unique blocks was free of holes, tears, and stains. More than that, the quilt was unquestionably a masterpiece, completed in 1854 by a woman named Harriet Findley Birch, or so several lines of embroidery on the back revealed.
With the help of the Courtyard Quilters, a quilting bee at the Sacramento retirement home where Maggie worked, she relearned her long-forgotten sewing skills and made a replica of the fragile antique. Fellow customers of her favorite local quilt shop admired her sampler so much that the proprietor invited her to teach a class so they could make their own versions. The success of that class ledto several more, which soon brought Maggie to the attention of local guilds, who invited her to lecture and teach at their monthly meetings, shows, and retreats.
Her students’ questions about the identity of Harriet Findley Birch and Maggie’s own enduring curiosity inspired her to find answers. She delved into research that took her from the De Young Museum in San Francisco—where she consulted with none other than future Cross-Country Quilter Grace Daniels, in a bit of serendipity that astonished them both when they reunited at Elm Creek Manor years later—to the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts. Eventually Maggie discovered that Harriet had worked as a mill girl in Lowell in the 1840s. Later, as a newlywed bride, she had traveled west with her husband along the Oregon Trail, eventually settling in Salem, Oregon. Maggie theorized that Harriet had collected quilt patterns from friends and family before setting out on the journey west. Perhaps the sampler was intended as a sort of quilt block library she could draw upon throughout her life as a wife, mother, and homesteader.
