The Tireless Homemaker & Painter

Mother was a frugal stay-at-home mom who took great pride in managing a tight family budget on a plumber’s salary. She not only was she the family’s CFO (chief financial officer), she also was the chief cook and bottle washer as well as the friendly neighborhood chauffeur, jockeying us three kids and our friends to and from school, to after-school get-togethers, and to scout meetings. She was a tireless homemaker who never sat idle for long.

Like most women of her era Mother was also a seamstress who took great delight in sewing clothes for her family. I often accompanied her to the fabric store where she spent an inordinate amount of time selecting patterns from the pattern books and finding just the right fabric, imagining the end product in her head. When we kids did our homework, she supervised us out of the corner of her eye all while spreading out the material on the living room table, meticulously pinning the pattern to the fabric, and then cutting it. Long after we were sent to bed, I often heard the soft hum of her sewing machine, it gently lulling me to sleep.

She never wasted material or threw away scraps of material, collecting them to use in an upcoming quilting project. For most of her adult life, Mother made quilts—lots of quilts. Her early quilts were practical ones that we used on a daily basis. Her later quilts, however, were creative expressions—works of art if you will—like the one pictured here.

“I always wanted to be an artist,” she once confessed to me. And she was. Mother was a tireless painter whose fabric became her canvas. The shapes, colors, and designs were her paints; her stitches were her brush strokes. She painted such fabulous pictures with her fabrics and stitch work. She awed me with her endless energy, creativity, and tenacity.

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