Deep in the dark and musty basement there’s a sagging sofa. Stacked on it are old quilts. Ah, just what I was hoping to find. I sell lots of vintage quilts, blankets, coverlets, and bedspreads. They are my hero products and I never miss the chance to pick them up at estate sales. I pull each one out and open them up to see their full story. Condition is everything. The ones with little to no stains or tears will make more profit. The well-loved ones with unraveling edges, rips in seams, holes or stains will sell to those imaginative crafters as “cutter quilts” where they’ll be cut up to make pillows, teddy bears, coasters, or wall art. I take them all. 

Once home I throw them over the banister to air them out. I rarely wash them, leaving that to the more experienced vintage textile buyer who knows how to launder them with little to no harm done. I photograph each one on my queen-size bed, making sure to give prospective collectors all the details—the good, the bad, the ugly. Then the pictures go into the listing. I fold each one and put them in a closet to wait for their next home. 

But this day is different. As I throw the last quilt over the banister I begin to notice something. The person, probably a woman, probably in the 1940s, has painstakingly cut out individual pieces to form the shape of a maple leaf within a square block of fabric. I can almost see this woman, cutting up her worn out house dress, or her husband’s shirt, or the play suit her toddler has outgrown, or an empty flour sack, into precise pieces. I can see her threading her needle and maybe as she sits next to the tall radio in the parlor and listens to a show, she sews the pieces together, adding her completed blocks to the stack in her sewing basket. 

This is a time when you didn’t just run down to Target or Walmart and buy a new bedspread or quilt when you needed one. This was a time when choices were limited, money was limited. When limitations led to resourcefulness and resourcefulness led to creativity. It was a time when you wouldn’t think of doing anything other than recycling, reusing, or repurposing. A time when all labor in the home was a labor of love. 

After she finished making that quilt it went on her bed or her children’s bed, where night after night, year after year it cocooned them and their dreams while outside the night was lit with rain or snow or moonlight. The quilt was tugged and kicked and thrown over and over restless and  tranquil sleepers alike. It was rubbed over the wash board and hung on the line. It began to show the signs we all get as we age. The wrinkles, the spots, the ragged edges, the fading. But instead of throwing the quilt out, instead of using it to keep the dog bed warm, the woman found more old shirts, old pants, old overalls. These she cut into little patches and as carefully as she had quilted the top, she attached these repairs over the holes. And as the quilt got older, she added more patches. 

I can’t seem to let this particular quilt go. It speaks to me of one woman’s industry. It touches me with a value that I find so important. Why are we so quick to throw away things? Why are we in so much of a rush to discard the old, the battered, the experienced? Why is having everything so new and shiny so important to us? 

There are lessons to be learned in the layers of this old quilt. It goes beyond that we push a little of our DNA into everything we create and that DNA adds a tiny connection from me to you. I like to think that like the quilt, the older I get, the softer, the more pliable I get and that I haven’t worn out my usefulness. I don’t understand why after 30 years in my profession, after seeing my industry change so drastically throughout that time and I reinvented myself to accept all those new challenges, I am looked at as irrelevant now. 

But with limitations come resourcefulness and resourcefulness leads to creativity. Maybe I’m more like the cutter quilt, whose time as one thing is over and now it’s time to shape shift into something else. The magic of the craftsmanship is still there, the beauty is still there, but the perspective has changed.