To tell you about the birth of Calico Connections, I almost want to start with humming and then breaking into song …. “Come and listen to my story, ‘bout a ….”
But this story isn’t about a man named Jed. How many here grew up on The Beverly Hillbillies? There’s no Jed in this story, no poor mountaineers that barely kept their families fed. But I think the tale here is even more fascinating.
My journey with a set of 1934 quilt squares began many years ago. Also, many miles were between where I found the squares and where they had their own beginnings.
I lived in Southern California, and around 2005 I visited a friend’s condo in Palm Springs. I was on the way home, about an hour plus inland towards Los Angeles, when I spied a ‘Yard Sale’ sign pointing left.
Curious as to whether yard sales in Palm Springs (a ritzier area than my neighborhood) had any different items than what ours had, I quickly turned left and followed the signs.
I was a bit disappointed as I wandered about the graveled front yard of this desert home. Odd pieces of furniture. Books. Tires. Kitchen ware. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the usual mix.
Then I rounded one table and came across all the bedding and linens. Again, nothing unusual. Until I spied a blue oval laundry basket with some old looking quilt tops in the basket. I beelined for the basket and started sifting through it.
My entire attitude had a swift change. In the basket were three pieced quilt tops, unquilted. Two were machine stitched and one was all hand stitched. All in vintage fabrics, many appearing to be from feed sack materials. And nestled in the basket was a set of quilt squares – Sunbonnet Sues and Overall Bills (or Overall Sam’s as some call them). The stitching wasn’t the best quality, but the squares had names on them, and all were pieced from vintage scraps.
Over the ten or twenty years prior, I’d been collecting a few old quilts and old quilt squares. When I could afford them – which was a rare occasion. I’d purchased a few individual squares, and they usually ran from ten to twenty dollars for one square, depending on the quality of stitching and the presentation.
I wanted these squares!
At least one of them. Maybe two, if I could afford them.
I frantically thought about how much cash I had in my wallet. I think it was around fifteen or twenty dollars. My mind jumped to what my meager bank balance was. I figured, if necessary, I could run to an ATM machine and withdraw an additional forty dollars.
I caught the woman’s attention that was handling the few customers browsing in the yard and asked her how much.
I forget if she answered fifteen or twenty dollars. “For all of it.”
For all of it? SOLD!
Whatever it was, I had enough in my wallet and didn’t have to make a quick dash to an ATM machine. I don’t remember if it took it all my money, or if I came home with five or ten dollars. I was delirious. All I knew was that I’d stolen this basket of goodies.
I gave the lady the cash and started to remove the items from the laundry basket.
“Oh, take the basket too,” she told me.
I probably didn’t reply. I think I was too busy hurrying to the car, without having it look like I was rushing, so I could get out of there before she discovered that she’d grossly undercharged for these items.
About a block away from the sale, I pulled over and stopped the car so I could look further at my delicious purchase. I couldn’t wait until I got home. After all, that was over an hour away. There was no way I could drive for that long not knowing exactly what was in the basket.
As I pulled the stack of quilt squares out, I looked at each one and counted them. Thirty! There were thirty squares in the set. All except three had names stitched on them. And one had the date ‘1934’ stitched into the bonnet.
Now, granted, these squares were not top-quality squares. They wouldn’t be winning any quilting prizes or awards. And they were old. They were all on old muslin and many had discolored patches. Also, a few were stitched so tightly that they’d pulled from the edges and some stitched too close to the edges to be able to piece together into a quilt.
They were still a treasure. And for that price, were still a steal.
I almost didn’t have to drive home. I think I floated home. Floated a good foot above the road filled with glee.
Once home, I pulled them out again. As I looked through the names, some having the same last names, I thought, at one place in 1934 all these people knew each other. Or, all of these people knew one person that had collected the squares.
The square with date in the bonnet said, “To Doris, From Mother.” I thought that was probably the square that connected all the others.
That night I couldn’t fix dinner fast enough. I wanted to hop on the computer and start putting names in the search engine so I could find out more about these precious pieces of fabric.
I came up empty.
Nothing.
Nada.
No search results on any of the names I put in.
A few days, or a few weeks later, I sat down and wrote all the names down. On some, the fabrics matched, and I made notes of that. On some, the stitching wasn’t very good, and I made notes ‘Either very young or very old.”
I tried again a few times to find a connecting piece between all these squares. I never made any progress.
Months passed and by now I was in the process of moving from California to Arizona. Everything got packed up. Everything got moved to storage in Arizona. And a year later I moved from Arizona to Texas.
After I’d been living in Texas a few months (or a year, who keeps track?) I started going through some of the boxes that I’d brought with me.
One box had the quilt squares and the notes I’d made on the yellow legal pad back in California.
Knowing a few years had passed since I’d tried to find out how the squares were connected, I sat down at the computer and started putting in random names again.
Bingo!
This time I hit the jackpot. In the few years since I’d looked before, a 1927 Athelstan census has been released and put online. Out of the list, seven of the names appeared on this Athelstan census.
I looked up Athelstan and discovered that it was a small, now-defunct town on the Iowa/Missouri border.
The hunt was on.
It took me weeks and months to find out more information. Whenever I had a spare chance, I was on the computer digging around for tidbits about Athelstan and the people of the town. My quest led me down rabbit holes where I’d surface hours later.
The more I found out about the real people involved with these squares from the past, the more I fell in love with my new project.
And then I had a realization. While I love, adore, and cherish old items from the past, especially those with sentimental value, my boys do not. If anything ever happened to me, they wouldn’t care about these fragile fabric pieces from strangers. These quilt squares would be back in a yard sale. Or even worse, tossed into a dumpster.
That couldn’t happen!
Not that I was ready to give them up yet, but I wanted to keep them safe. Maybe even get them back home. I wondered if there was a local museum in the area that may be interested in them. Some day. When I was ready to let go of them.
I had another BINGO! moment. With very little effort, I discovered The Taylor County Historical Museum, located in Bedford, which turned out to be about only twenty miles from Athelstan. I emailed the current president, Helen Jansen, and told her what I had. I included a document which listed the names of all the people that had squares in this set. I forget if I sent pictures of all of the squares, or pictures of just a few. (This was late 2010) I also explained that I wasn’t ready to give them up yet but wondered if the museum would be interested in them when I was.
Helen promptly returned my email. She said she was excited about this discovery and the museum would love to have the squares. She said there were several quilting groups in the area, and they could possibly finally complete them into a finished quilt. She mentioned that one of the other volunteers, Rosalyn Cummings, mother was one of the names on one of the squares.
From there Rosalyn was included in emails. She confirmed that her mother, Evelyn Bownes had a square in this set, along with her aunt, Maxine Bownes. She also said that one of the people represented by one of the squares, Leona Byrns, was still alive. She said she would ask Leona about it the next time she saw her.
That was interesting to me as Leona is the only one who has an age stitched onto her square. ’18 mos’.This information came in handy later when I was trying to figure out when ‘Mother’ had given the squares to Doris.
The airwaves were filled with emails traveling back and forth.
It still took a while before I got to Iowa. Four years – four long years before 2014 came about and I could get my happy self to Iowa.
But the four years were not in vain. I continued researching what I could, when I could. That’s when the question about when Nellie Morris (now that I knew who she was and that she wasn’t just ‘Mother’) gave the squares to Doris. I figured it was either for her birthday or for Christmas. Doris’ birthday was September 26th.
Since I was now in contact with Leona, I emailed her and asked her when her birthday was. It turns out that her birthday was June 7th, which would have put her 18-month-old mark in December, not in September. Voila! The squares were given as a Christmas present.
I wanted to write the story of these quilt squares. I started writing the book, Calico Connections, twice. Before I’d even delivered the squares to the museum.
While I wanted to convey as much truth as possible in my story, I also knew that I didn’t have enough facts to write it as a factual book. It would be a fictional tale. I started writing it in September 2012. I wrote two chapters.
Don’t ask me why, because I couldn’t tell you, but I didn’t like the start of the story.
I sat on the project for a few months and in 2013 I started it over.
In 2014 I made the trip to Iowa. And still didn’t come home and start on the book.
My trip to Iowa was ten years ago – 2014. It’s still a treasured memory. The museum hosted a Quilt Tea for me to present the squares. 72 people attended. Quite a turn out for a small Iowa town. I spent three days there and spent a lot of time seeing the area and meeting people. I met many descendants of the women that had created the squares so long ago. And I got to meet Leona, the lady that was 18 months old when her mother stitched her square.
Now, it’s not to say that I totally neglected these fabric pieces that were ingrained in my heart. I wrote several articles about them. Pieces featuring the quilt squares were published in Quilter’s World, Country Magazine, Prairie Times, Funds for Writers, and Writing Naked. I wrote a few children’s short stories about them.
I wrote Memories on Muslin, a small factual book about the quilt squares and their Athelstan roots. I wrote A Gift from the Heart, a children’s early reader.
I finally started working on finishing Calico Connections. I got a cover designed for the book. It was going to be my ‘Christmas book’ in 2022. But real life intervened and slowed me down. I didn’t make it for 2023 either. Now I’m working towards having it done by this Christmas. It will be close.
All this from one quick stop at a yard sale almost twenty years ago.
Trisha Faye 