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Anna Grossnickle Hines
tells us the story behind the Quilts
It’s
all my mother’s fault. First, when I was a child, she told
me that I should do whatever I wanted to do. Then she started
making beautiful quilts.
When the family decided to make
a quilt secretly for Mom, I wanted to make several squares
for it. I looked through Mom’s books and magazines for ideas
and asked her lots of questions. To keep her from being suspicious,
I told her I was thinking of illustrating a book with quilts.
Actually that idea had occurred to me before, but it seemed
to crazy to say out loud until I had this chance to pretend
that I didn’t really mean it. Mom seemed a little surprised
at first, but if that is what I wanted to do, she was more
than willing to help. She collected fabric scraps from her
friends and brought out more books for me to look at. Maybe
it wasn’t such a crazy idea.
I’d made quilts for each of my
children—big, simple designs using large pieces of fabric.
I’d sewn their clothing and enough dolls and stuffed animals
to fill a well-stocked toy store, and now the squares for
my mother’s quilt, but I’d never done anything as intricate
as the quilts I was visualizing for my book. Could I really
do it?
In 1996, at my mother’s dining
room table, I drew the design for "Good Heavens,"
spread out the blue, green, yellow, and white fabrics, and
began to sew. Sewing pieces of fabric together in a design
is called piecing. Strip by strip I sewed the tiny
bits of fabric together until the whole thing was pieced.
Golden suns and white moons and stars floated from the green
lawn to the deep blue sky. It worked! I could do it!
Over the next three years I purchased
hundreds of strips and squares of fabric and made
 eighteen
more designs. I used piecing for "Ballet" and "Do
You Know Green?" The winter tree pair ("Silhouettes"
and "Shadows") I pieced using very small squares
of fabric. Then I appliquéd the branches. To appliqué
is to sew smaller pieces of fabric on top of a larger piece
to make a picture or a decorative design. "Take Out"
is done completely with appliqué. Appliqué can be done with
a sewing machine, but I did mine by hand, turning the edges
under with the needle as I went.
The next step was to quilt the
designs. This is done by sandwiching a layer of cotton padding
between the design and a piece of backing fabric and then
stitching a decorative pattern through all the layers. Quilting
is the stitching, and it can be done by hand or by machine.
Fine hand quilting is admired for tiny, even stitches. "Take
Out" and "Ballet" were two of the first designs
I quilted by hand. The winter trees pages were my first efforts
at machine quilting.
My mother told me that quilting
is contagious, and she is right. She was inspired to start
by her sister. The two of them, along with two sisters-in-law
and a brother, come from three corners of the country to meet
at quilt shows, visit fabric stores, and share ideas. I have
visited my mother’s quilt guild in Santa Clarita, California,
and joined the local Milford Valley Quilters Guild in Pennsylvania,
where I’ve found even more support and encouragement.
--Anna Grossnickle Hines
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