Growing up, my mother kept an old quilt top balled up on a closet shelf. I never questioned why the grandmother’s flower garden top wasn’t finished, who made it, or where the fabrics originated. We just moved it around. When I began to quilt in 2010, I pulled it out and looked at it carefully. It was made of flour sacks. We surmised that my great grandmother must have been the seamstress. The flowers were joined by all manner of white and off-white fabrics, and it wouldn’t lay flat no matter how much I ironed it. My mother just thought it was ugly. So I decided to see what I could do. I plucked the flowers from the white fabric. There were seventeen of them. I hand appliqued them to pink batik. Then I set the blocks on point and sashed them with lace. I bordered them with navy blue and used doilies made by my great aunt in between the points. I gave the flimsy to my mother for her 87th birthday, and she enjoyed it very much for her last two weeks on this Earth.
