Just my grandmother's quilt

My grandmother (Grammy Cann), my dad's mom, was a neat lady. Her full name was Gladys Augusta (Durkee) Cann and she married a very taciturn man, somewhere around 1920 or so. When I was about 14 she told me that when she was young, her friends called her Happy Bottom. It took me a minute to figure that out!! LOL

When I met her (considerably later) she was a tiny little lady. She lived to be 78 or so, and she and her husband of 50+ years lived in a house with no hot water, no bathroom and no furnace.

After she died, I discovered from her obituary that she had been the organist in the little church that she went to for 68 years (or something like that). I had no idea - although I did know that she was very musical - many of the Durkees were.

She had beautiful gardens, her houseworking skills were fair to middlin' and she NEVER ever had a cross word for anyone. I never saw her wear slacks - when we went to the beach she was always in a skirt. She had two children, my dad who probably weighed in the neighbourhood of 10 pounds and his sister, my aunt Evelyn. Aunt Evelyn was born 16 years after my dad. Grammy Cann MIGHT have been 5 feet tall and she might have weighed 100 pounds - maybe 105 - and having a HUGE baby as her first must have been a tad (slight understatement) difficult. I can understand the delay before Aunt Evelyn came along!

Grandma taught me to knit (more than once) and refined my crochetting skills. She let my sister and I put her hair in curlers. At the time, that seemed entirely reasonable to Mary Ellen and I, however, when I got older and realized that washing her hair with no running water and only a well pump in the kitchen, must have been much more difficult than we would would have thought at the time. When we went to visit them (for two weeks every summer), I often got to stay at Grammy Cann's overnight for a night or two by myself.

She was interested in genealogy, as was I and she had endless patience for my questions.

She quilted as well - and I have one of her last few quilts. It is coming apart now and I'm trying to decide what to do with it. I believe I saw her working on this in the mid 70s, so it isn't very old, but it is in quite poor shape. It is also a rather ugly colour - I suspect that she used fabric she had on hand and bought muslin and some mustard yellow fabric to tie it all together and finish it off. (Yellow is not my favourite colour, probably because I can't wear it at all!)

Here is the whole quilt. I'm not sure what this pattern is called - and I have to say that it looks rather better through the camera than it does when you are standing and looking at it!

 This is one of my favourite blocks. I sort of think that she turned two of the half square triangles on their sides, now that I'm looking at this in the photo! I don't think that you can tell from the photo - but the stitching on one of the seams has come apart (I can fix that in this block).

 I'm pretty sure that there are open seams in these blocks too.

 See the frayed bit of fabric? I suppose that it wasn't cotton and so it isn't hanging together too well.

It is impossible to put a quilt on the floor here without having at least one of the three cats come to inspect it. This is Sarah. She, Molly and Ellie were all out on the deck in the sun - but she had to come in to walk around the quilt and smell the blue ink splotch that is in the centre of the block right in front of her. Funny about cats and quilts, isn't it!?

 More disintegration.

I think this is my favourite block - I love the paisleys and the blues and pinks - and it is on the edge so it isn't complete. Sigh.

Anyway. My next part of this project is to decide what I will do with it. The batting appears to be cotton batting - not put together in a sheet, but clumped together into hunks. The backing is plain muslin too.

Any ideas?