Loving Reminders

I am joining Kelli's Show & Tell Friday with a little doll quilt that I have had for 53 years.


It is 16 X 21 inches and made of plain white muslin with narrow blue binding machine-stitched on the edges and as an inner border on the top. The picture of the puppies in the middle and the lettering is done with fabric paint pens. The quilted grid is hand-stitched in blue thread.

What makes this little quilt so special to me is that it was made for me by my grandmother (my father's mother) who was of the Old Order Amish faith. Of course, it is not in the style that one typically thinks of Amish quilts, but then again she made it for her "English" (non-Amish) granddaughter! My father had left the Amish way of life when he was sixteen. My grandmother lived in Indiana and we lived in Portland, Oregon. She had never seen me and I had never seen her. The Amish didn't believe in photographs or telephones, so mostly we kept in touch by the occasional letter. Then she sent this little quilt and a matching one to my sister, Linda, just before my third birthday. Mom and Dad had gotten Linda and me baby dolls for Christmas and Dad had made little wooden beds for the dolls. The quilts from Grandma fit the beds perfectly! So they got played with a lot! It didn't occur to me until I was much older what loving care had gone into their creation. I think the baby dolls and even the beds were given away at some point when we outgrew them, but Mom made sure we put the little quilts away as keepsakes. I only got to see my grandmother for one visit, when Dad, Mom, Linda, and I, along with our Cocker-Spaniel puppy, took a trip from California to Indiana during the summer of 1958. To my five year-old mind that trip seemed like something out of a storybook: experiencing the old-fashioned farming way of life of my Amish relatives. But when we came back to the West Coast, I always had the little quilt to remind me! ;)