A Carding Chronicle by Sonja Hakala
Edie Wolfe sat back with a sigh as she checked off an item on her to-do list. “It never seems to get shorter,” she explained to her dog Nearly as she carried her empty tea mug to the kitchen sink. “There’s always so many projects to get done, and yet so little time…”
Her phone’s ring cut Edie’s sentence short.
“Hey Edie, it’s Ruth. I just got a call from Fred Makepeace, Genevieve died yesterday morning.”
“But she was at the guild meeting only three nights ago,” Edie protested. “She looked fine. What happened?”
“Heart attack, I guess,” Ruth said. “Fred woke up in the morning. Genevieve didn’t.”
The air hung word-free on the phone between them for a long moment as their familiar world rocked gently around them.
“Oh my, and they just finished building that big quilting studio for her last year,” Edie said, “and she was so excited about it. That is not fair, so not fair.”
“Yeah, Fred wants to know if we’ll go over to the house to help him figure out what to do with her fabric stash.” The two friends sighed as one. “Will you come?”
Edie looked at the to-do list now lying unattended on her table. It was tempting to say no because going through someone else’s creative paraphernalia felt like going through someone else’s underwear drawer. But there was no way she would leave Ruth to face that task alone.
“Of course. Should we ask Agnes to come too?” she asked.
“Yeah, the more, the merrier, I guess,” Ruth said with another sigh.
“I told Fred we’d make it over tomorrow morning, if that works for you and Agnes. Does it?”
“Sure, sure.”
Genevieve Makepeace had been a quilter for longer than just about anybody else in Vermont. She made her first patchwork project when Jimmy Carter was President, long before the quilting industry counted its worth in billions of dollars, long before there were shops dedicated just to quilting fabric, long before 16 million other people decided to take up fiber arts as a hobby or vocation.
Before she retired from teaching elementary school, Gen made only five or six quilts a year. After retirement, that number shot up to five or six quilts a month. Everyone in her guild knew about her voracious appetite for new fabric, and it had been a long time since any vacation she took with her husband didn’t include stops in quilt shops or shows.
So Ruth, Edie and Agnes thought they were prepared for what they would see when Gen’s daughter Clara led them to her Mom’s sewing room.
“I hope you folks can help,” she said as she swung the doors wide open. “Dad and I are just overwhelmed.”
Edie felt a chill jog across her shoulders as her eyes swept around Genevieve’s sewing studio. The longest wall in the brightly-lit room was covered by a drawer system consisting of large metal baskets suspended between slides. And each basket—about three feet square and a foot deep—was filled with fabric.
Most of it was sorted by color—blues, greens, reds, browns. Some of it was sorted by fabric type—stripes, dots, florals, geometrics. One whole group of baskets was filled with batiks, another with flannels, another with children’s fabrics.
The opposite wall was covered with bookcases, each of them groaning-full with craft books, art books, the thrillers that Gen had loved to read for pleasure, and volumes of history.
“Either one of you have any idea where to start?” Agnes said. Ruth and Edie shook their heads while they mentally measured the task ahead of them.
“There’s no way any of us could incorporate this into our own stashes,” Ruth finally said. “I’ve been trying to reduce my fabric for a couple of years now, and it’s finally beginning to show. I don’t want to leave something like this to my daughter.”
“What about that place over in New Hampshire, the one that buys inventory from stores that close and remnants from manufacturers?” Edie suggested. “I would think they’d be interested in this.”
Agnes and Ruth nodded in unison. “I like that idea,” Agnes said.
Ruth dropped her purse on a nearby chair. “I suppose we should start by figuring out how much yardage is in here so we can give them an idea of what we have.”
“How about we start by picking out a basket, and measuring the fabric in it piece by piece,” Edie said.
After a bit of hemming and hawing, the three friends chose a basket in the middle of the wall. It was filled with all sorts of striped fabrics, mostly in blues and greens.
“How much do you suppose is in here?” Ruth asked as she and Agnes lifted it onto Genevieve’s cutting table. “Ugh, I don’t know why but I am always surprised at how heavy this stuff is.”
“I’m not sure…thirty yards maybe?” Edie said. “I’ll keep a running total if you two measure, is that okay?”
In a matter of minutes, the friends established a system, Agnes unfolding, Ruth measuring, and Edie adding up the yardage. And then, just as they reached the bottom of the basket, Agnes gasped.
“Oh look at these old crazy quilt squares,” she said as she lifted up a small pile of fragile, embroidered fabric patches. “Where do you suppose these came from?”
Edie smoothed out one of the squares with a gentle finger, lingering over two small holes where something had lunched on it at some point in the past. “Wasn’t Genevieve’s mother a quilter? I wonder if these were hers.”
“Oh, just look at the embroidery,” Ruth said as she spread more of the squares out on the work table.
“A lot of time went into these,” Agnes said. “Don’t you just love that herringbone stitching?”
“I remember my grandmother doing that kind of work,” Edie said. “There are enough blocks here to make a quilt top.”
Agnes shook her head as she looked around the room. “How many unfinished quilts do you suppose are in this room in places we haven’t looked yet?”
“Well, I can tell you that there’s enough in this basket alone to make a bunch,” Edie said. “You just measured out 70 yards of fabric.”
“Seventy yards. Whew. And how many baskets are there?” Ruth asked, starting to count. Agnes joined her, starting at the opposite end of the wall.
“Forty,” they said together.
“That’s 2,800 yards of fabric,” Edie said, shaking her head. “And I’ll bet Genevieve’s got scraps, unfinished projects, and bolts of cloth tucked in places we haven’t even looked yet.”
“And now it will all be sold or given away to be used by someone else,” Agnes said.
Edie thought about her untouched to-do list at home, and then about her own closet full of half-finished projects. What would her son and daughter do with all her stuff? Sell it? Give it away? Throw it away? Diana enjoyed quilts but she had no interest in sewing. And Daniel wouldn’t have a clue what to do.
And what about her friends? Edie glanced from Ruth to Agnes, knowing full well that their closets were just as full as hers. They all shared the same love of making. The problem was—what do you do with what you make?
She suddenly felt the full weight of the fabric that Genevieve had left behind pressing down on her shoulders. Too much stuff, she thought, we all have too much stuff.
“You know, I suddenly feel the need to go home and sew,” she said to her friends. “I vote we contact that store to see if they would be interested in buying Gen’s stash. I’ll be happy to make the call.”
Agnes nodded. “That’s a good a place to start.” She stroked a yard of silver and pale blue striped fabric, perfect for making holiday gift bags.
“You should take that,” Ruth said. “To remember Genevieve.”
“Yeah, I think I will.”
Edie reached out to touch a soft green and beige piece. Its stripes had centers of gold thread. “This is lovely,” she said. “Gen had such exquisite taste.”
Ruth picked up a yard of turquoise that reminded her of the sea. “Maybe I’ll take just one piece,” she said. “For Genevieve.”
Then Agnes pointed at the embroidered squares. “What about these? The store in New Hampshire won’t have any use for half-finished projects.”
The three friends looked at one another, each aware of the others’ thoughts. “Shall I ask Clara to make us some tea?” Edie asked. “I think we should rescue Genevieve’s half-finished projects before I call that store in New Hampshire, don’t you?”
Ruth nodded. “You’re right, we can’t just let them go into the wind. Seems almost sacrilegious somehow.”
The three friends sighed again. Then Edie gasped. “The school,” she said. “How many students did Genevieve teach how to sew?”
“Too many to count,” said Agnes.
“What if we ask for their help finishing Genevieve’s projects, and then sell them to raise money for the school. There’s always a need in a school,” Edie said.
Ruth laughed. “We could call it the Half-Finished Project Guild. Make it a town-wide thing. We’ve all got stuff we should finish.”
“I love that idea,” Aggie said.
And so the Half-Finished Project Guild was born. This year marks its tenth anniversary, and it gets a bigger all the time. Last year, they raised enough money to buy a new curtain for the auditorium stage, and this year, they’re hoping to raise enough to revamp the changing rooms at the school’s skating rink. It will be a stretch, but I think they’re gonna make it.
