Janet Moffatt

Janet Moffatt

NM87111-004

Janet MacDonald Moffatt

Evelyn Salinger

12/5/08

Del Thomas

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Evelyn Salinger

Evelyn Salinger (ES): This is Evelyn Salinger, and I am conducting a Quilters' S. O. S. - Save Our Stories interview with Janet MacDonald Moffatt. Today's date is December 5, 2008. It is approximately 10:50 in the morning and we are at Janet's home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Hi, Janet.

Janet Moffatt (JM): Hi.

ES: It is nice of you to agree to do this today. I would like to start out by talking with you about the quilt that you have on the frame here, now, in your living room. Would you tell us about that quilt?

JM: This is a French Braid quilt, and it has been done with scraps from my collection and also from Evelyn's collection [laughs.] because when you try to get a group of rose to maroon pieces together. You realize that a lot of the maroons have too much orange in them and so you had to search further to find what you needed to do this, because I think there are probably about eleven different fabrics in it and all those have to coordinate. So together, Evelyn and I were able to, out of our collections, get the eleven. It has come together and looks very nice.

ES: It's beautiful. Would you describe the colors? You said rose to burgundy. And then in between that you have other variations of color.

JM: Well, I think even the light color--there might be a beige that has some rose in it, because you needed to go from light to dark. This is sort of an offshoot of a project that I have worked on for several years. And that project is Pioneer Braids. The Pioneer Braid class was taught by someone in our quilt group at Bear Canyon [Senior Center.] and at the same time I was given a book by my daughter-in-law that had a picture of a quilt constructed in a very different way. Rather than do it the way it was taught in the quilt group, I chose to do it the way it was done in the book. And that is, varying your colors from light to dark, starting at the top and then working down. Whereas the class was taught to just put haphazardly anything together. When you did it that way, you were concerned with everyone. Is this going to go with the one next to it? And this and that. When I line this up, I line it up so that all of the rows in the quilt are done exactly the same, except that the second strip, you switch the top two, which gives you a chevron look all through the quilt. And that did not exist in the other Pioneer Braid. This always has a chevron look if you make that switch.

ES: Hm, interesting.

JM: That pleased me no end. And from this basic foundation that came from this book, I have done over thirty quilts, this way. Most of them have been throws, which would average forty-five by sixty, or around that size.

ES: For whom do you make those?

JM: I give them away as gifts. I have actually sold two of them. I didn't really intend to sell any because everybody who is a quilter realizes that you can't get enough money for the work that you do. And originally, I hand quilted these. Now I don't. I do the straight machine quilting on these. It is wonderful to have an opportunity to use your scraps and since we have an exposure at the Senior Center to many, many scraps, I probably have at least a thousand two and a half by five and a quarter inch pieces cut already!

ES: Oh, my heavens.

JM: When I lay it out, I lay it out on a table with the colors that go together all the way down and even in the throws, you have about 36 different fabrics. So, these are all cut and put into little plastic sandwich bags, and you lay these sandwich bags side by side and try to get a good color combination. And then, when you have done that, you take all of these out of the sandwich bags and from the very top, you pick the one up and the other one all the way down through all thirty-six and put them all in one bag. Then you repeat this seven times for a regular throw quilt, and you use a lot more than this in a large quilt. I have done two twin size quilts this way, some of which had strips in between the Pioneer Braid, because that gives it a lot more width, but you still have the chevron effect.

ES: Very effective. I have seen some of your throws before.

JM: I don't happen to have one that's made up right now, but I have one in there all lined up and ready to go.

ES: We will take a picture of the present quilt which you have out that has some of that. What is the size of the one you are doing here?

JM: This is probably a king size quilt. I haven't measured it. Usually, I have a little piece of paper that tells me how big it is, like I do on the corner of a quilt in the other room that I am ready to quilt. And I may have done that, but I misplaced it. I could measure the width of it.

ES: We'll do that later. What do you have on the back? [clock chimes.]

JM: This actually has a print on the back of it. But it is a very small print. I do like to use either a print where the quilting is very obvious or use the unbleached muslin. I am more apt to use a small print, because I think it gives the back a lot more character. You can't always find something that's just right for this, but this is sort of a beige with a little maroon in it, so that so that I think the quilting will be quite visible.

ES: Who is going to get this quilt?

JM: Well, I have five grandchildren who are in their marriageable age group. They go from nineteen to twenty-nine right now, so I have been trying to get a collection of quilts ready for them when they decide to get married. This will be the fourth one in the collection of five and so I think that this one is the one that my granddaughter, Alina, is interested in because she has watched it grow from the very beginning.

ES: She lives here in town?

JM: She lives here in town, and she even helped to baste it before we put in on the rack here. And I have a picture of her standing behind the quilt while we were doing the basting along with her two grandmothers. Not only me, but her grandmother on her father's side. So, I think she just has a feeling for this. [clock strikes.]

ES: Very nice. What will you bind it with? Will you use again this maroon?

JM: I have it all cut, and I think I will use the maroon on the binding. That's already to go. I usually cut my binding when I put it together because you never know. If you put the fabric back in your closet, you might get it out and use it for something else and it is so much better to have the binding all made.

ES: That's good advice. What was your earliest contact with quilters that you remember?

JM: Now I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but for twenty-five years before I came here, I lived in Charlton, New York which is a small town just north of Schenectady, New York. There I had many friends who were--we were quite separated as far as where we lived. Charlton was a large town geographically, but I had many friends who were interested in fabric art. And this all started with a fabric art group that got together. There was a lady who lived--she was the next house up from me--but basically it was at least a half a mile away in this farm country. And she was a Mormon, and of course they have a great history of quilting and making use of what they have and also decorating their houses and so forth.

She and another lady down at the other end of my street got together and we did fabric art. We had many different projects that we worked on. Some was folded fabric, and then we did appliqué, and we went on into making a quilt that was all different, that had all different types of squares in it--the Sampler quilt. So that was the first thing that we did together. It was just wonderful. In fact, they even made metal patterns which I will probably never use again because we do so much with the strip quilting now and cutting. And metal, they’re there, but I don't think anybody will ever use them again. But that's how they were cut out in the first place.

ES: That was what we call fussy cutting these days.

JM: Yes, right.

ES: Some of us still do that, depending on what we are doing.

JM: This was a Sampler quilt. It was not quilted. We actually tied it and mine just fit on the top of my king size bed, and I put a large ruffle on the bottom of it that had a band around it. This was done in maroon and blue and now my son has it. I took the ruffle off, recycled the ruffle into another quilt which I have that's a Dresden Plate for the background. He has that quilt. I don't know if he is using that right now or not, but he has it.

ES: Where is your son?

JM: He lives nearby. He lives about thirty miles from here in Edgewood, New Mexico. And now he probably could have used it with the ruffle on it because they have a king size bed, but before he was married, I wanted him to use it on the bed that he had. That's when I took the ruffle off of it.

ES: What year was that, approximately, when you made that Sampler quilt?

JM: I would say that probably, maybe in the late ‘70's. I would really have to look that up to find out if there are any dates on some of the paperwork that I have that goes back to that.

ES: And that was the beginning, essentially, for your own quilting.

JM: That was the beginning.

ES: Did you continue to do that while you still lived there in Charlton?

JM: The group may still be going on. It was called Hands Together Quilters from Charlton. Up until a few years ago, I know that they were still in operation. They did do a quilt for Charlton, New York, of which I have a poster.

ES: Was that for the Bicentennial?

JM: That was for Charlton's Bicentennial. I was not really able to help much with that because my husband was ill at that time, so I did not get to do any of the appliqué, but I did do some of the hand quilting when I went back for his memorial service. In an area like that, I think that the quilters, they sort of gravitate to one another. And there was not a quilting society like there is here. So, you need to have a group that gets together. I don't think you go to a quilt group, even for one day, without learning something.

ES: Absolutely.

JM: You pick up something every time you're there. It doesn't matter whether it's how you bury your knot, and so forth, I've even changed in the last few months in how I'm doing my work. So, I think it is good for quilters to gather. A lot of these women, I know, are not alive anymore. I do have a quilt that I put on my bed once in a while that was a Friendship quilt made by this group that has their writing on it and all the little sayings. You can keep your feelings going by looking at something like that.

ES: Memories. Were you then, because of that group, self-taught, and you were learning from others, but did you take classes or something like that?

JM: I'd suppose you would consider that these were classes, because what we would do was, we would work on one of the blocks in the Sampler quilt and then bring it back. So, I think they probably were classes, but not the same as are run by some of the stores and so forth. It was very different. I don't remember whether I paid anything for these or not. No. I think we just probably did it because we needed that time together.

ES: What were your sewing skills as you grew up?

JM: Well, I think that it is a genetic thing, because my grandmothers and my mother sewed, and I can remember the first coat that I ever bought in a store. All of my clothes were made by my mother. I think that many times it was because I was tall and large for my age and so therefore it was so much easier to make something than it was to try and buy something in the store. And at that time, it seemed as though fabric was a lot cheaper than it is now. Therefore, it was very worthwhile to be able to sew. I can remember my grandmother made absolutely amazing buttonholes and so my mother would always take the clothing down to her and let her do the buttonholes on many of her special projects.

So, I did a lot of clothing for my children. I remember one day, it must have been a snowy day and I had two young children, but I had the desire to make something, so I looked into my collection of fabrics and found a couple pieces of fabric. One was a corduroy, I think it was red corduroy, and the other one was a beige and red flannel. And so, I made a jacket for my daughter which went down through the family. I'm sure lots of other people used it, but it was made with just what I had on hand. I can remember that because it was such a bright light, to be able to do something like that. It even had the old buttons that you could put on it.

Probably the first piece of furniture that we ever bought was a sewing machine in a cabinet. And the cabinet was limed oak and when I think about it today, I realize that does not represent me at all because I don't have modern furniture. I pretty quickly after that realized that I was more colonial or Victorian than that. But I had this sewing machine for many, many years and it may have stood out as a sore thumb with the rest of my things. But I didn't hide it because I needed it nearby, so that if I had a half an hour, I could sit down and do something on it.

I can remember during the holiday season, having something that needed to be created every week and many times it might not have been finished, but they'd get it in a box with a promise.
[laughs.]

ES: What are your favorite aspects of quilting?

JM: Well, I think it is the fact that I love fabric. If anybody tied my hands behind my back when I went in a store, even if it's a store that sells readymade clothing, I don't think I could handle it. I think you just have to touch that fabric. It's the feel of it and the fact that you can create something out of nothing. Well, it is not out of nothing, you are creating it out of beautiful fabric. I don't think that I had the time many years before that to cut out fabric and put it together again, the way you do when you are quilting. It was more making larger pieces with larger pieces of material and getting something done.

I think that you have to change that whole way of thinking when you are a quilter, because you are not going to finish it in a day. I don't care what these books say about quilt-in-a-day, if you want to sit there twenty-four hours and do it, you might finish it.

ES: Even twenty-four hours doesn't do it. It takes hundreds of hours--especially if you do hand quilting.

JM: That's right.

ES: Do you hand piece as well?

JM: I have done a lot of hand piecing. Now it's done mainly by machine. I think that any of the hand work that's done might be an appliqué. I don't think that I excel at that, so I don't do much of that.

ES: The quilting process--what is the part you like the best?

JM: I'm not one of those that enjoys putting the quilt together as much as I enjoy the hand quilting that's in it. I love doing it. I like thinking about it and getting it put together, but so many quilters that I know put together one top after another and have quite a collection of them that have never been quilted. I am not one of those. Although, I can see in my fabric collection that there must be a dozen or more quilts before I even get down to the point that I have to buy any fabric--except for the background. You know, you do need the background fabric.

ES: Or in the backing you need a big whole piece, though you can piece that, too, of course.

JM: That, you're not going to have in your collection, but the smaller pieces and fabric you can work with. I like the scrap quilts.

ES: Are many of these scraps left from sewing projects and things like that from earlier on?

JM: I don't think I have that much left in there. I think a lot of these I have collected through the years [clock chimes.] may be from quilts that I have made. But also, we have such an exposure to a variety of quilting materials through the Senior Center that I think I have collected a lot from that group.

ES: Do people keep bringing in their whole collections when they give up their sewing?

JM: When you think about it, why are they throwing this away? Why are they getting rid of this? I know I need to clean my closet out. [laughs.] Maybe not so much my quilting scraps but there's a lot of stuff on the top shelf that I may never make into a quilt. It's hard to discard it.

ES: I think you are involved in charity quilts, too, quite a bit.

JM: I really have a very strong feeling for the Ronald MacDonald House. And the reason for this is, because I had a child who had leukemia and she was cared for in Children's Hospital in Boston. There were many parents who came in there and who had to go back and stay in a room alone at night. Didn't have anybody to talk to. Didn't have any place to make a meal or make a cup of tea. And I was very sympathetic. I didn't suffer from this problem because my mother lived about twenty miles from there. And so, I could go home to her and then get up in the morning and come back and to be with Christine. But I realized that there is such a need for this communal home for parents who have to be away from home to be with their children.

The need is there for adults as well, but it’s not the same thing. I do think now, the way the medical system is, that a home for people who are coming to stay with adults is just as necessary, because we all need an advocate.

ES: And you need to be able to express yourself to somebody and not just to go back to a room by yourself and turn on the TV.

JM: It is so important. And so, the Ronald MacDonald charity is just wonderful and our group at Bear Canyon Senior Center has made over a thousand quilts that have been taken down to the group here in Albuquerque. And the quilts there are given out. Each child who leaves the facility is able to choose a quilt. So, we keep producing, but there is a lot of coming and going from this facility, so I don't know if we can satisfy all their needs. But we work at it.

ES: When did you get started at the Bear Canyon Quilters?

JM: Well, I have lived in Albuquerque about twenty years, now. And I think that was one of the first things that I did at Bear Canyon Senior Center.

ES: So it already existed when you came?

JM: Oh, yes. Bear Canyon Senior Center was fairly new. It may be twenty-two or twenty-three years old, but the quilt group had already formed when I came there. I had a lot to learn, and this was a wonderful way to learn it, with all of these women who were so willing to share. The quilters in there are very different. They are very different in the kinds of patterns that they choose. We're mainly traditional quilters. I don't think that the quilts that we make for ourselves tend to be Southwestern. I think that the quilts that we make for the Raffle, we try to alternate and one year it will be a Southwestern quilt and the next year, a more traditional quilt.

But for our own quilts, we tend to be much more traditional than that. And not doing all the modern things that you see now in quilt books or in quilt displays, not that they aren't beautiful, but these are almost not usable quilts. They are made basically for decoration. We don't have the homes to display these on the walls that some people might have. And even some of the Southwestern quilts that we have made at Bear Canyon, really belong in a museum. They are not one that you could use on your bed.

ES: Would you say a little more about this raffle, what is it for?

JM: We make a Raffle quilt each year for Bear Canyon for any of the extra things that need to be done there. The federal government and the state and the city provide a lot of our needs. And our membership price is so minimal that it just can't possibly cover all of the activities and all of the needs of the local center, and so they do things like buy--I know that one of the first years, they bought fans which are in lot of the rooms with the proceeds from this raffle, and I appreciate that because I go to exercise class and we need those just about every day that we're in there. Also, they have put cabinets in some of the rooms. And the cabinet we use for storing our quilts was one of those that were bought through the raffle. And I think we've done one, as far as I can think back, for every year that I've been there, anyway. There's been a Raffle quilt. Sometimes they've made three thousand dollars on them.

It seems as though people are not quite as willing to buy the tickets anymore as they used to be. You have to approach them. Some of the seniors that come there feel that they need to donate something to the Center, either in giving of their time or in doing something like this. But a lot of people are just there for themselves. And that's very sad. But that's a need a senior center can do something about. These people probably need the time spent with people that are in the same position as they are.

ES: The quilting group there, I think has an unusual system in that you all work on each other's quilts. I don't know any other group that does that.

JM: Yes. I think that it is a good system, in a way, because we usually have seven quilts that we can work on. What it does is that it stimulates people to spend time with a variety of people in the group. If you bring in your own quilt every time and sit and work on it, I think you lose something. And I really feel that even when I have a quilt in there that's on the rack, I feel as though I have to be with that quilt all the time. And it is very good look around and say, 'Well, I haven't sat next to this person lately. I think that it is time that I did and have a relationship with them.'

It does irritate me once in a while when I see a group of five at one quilt and maybe one person alone at another quilt. I won't let that happen. I think that that's wrong. We're there for the fellowship as well as the quilting. And how do you learn something if you are not right there talking to a person who has information to offer. Or maybe, you need to offer the information to this person. I don't think that every quilter in there is an expert in all aspects of quilting. Some don't appreciate putting quilts together at all, and never do that. Whereas some of the others as I say have a supply of quilts that are ready to be quilted at any time.

ES: How does quilting impact your family?

JM: Well, you know I think that all are very appreciative. My two daughters are much better sewers than I am. They can create things that I would not even attempt to do, probably. And do it in a very different way. One daughter excels in construction technique in clothing. She's not doing much of it anymore because her children have grown and the boys don't want clothes that are handmade, except that she has a very tall son, and he wanted some clothes like the sweatpants to wear. He's six foot six and you can't buy anything like that, so she's had to make some of those things for him. You used to be able to buy the sweatshirt material. That's not available anymore. You have to get that online. You never see that in the quilt stores because everything's fleece. And he wanted the sweatshirt fabric. She's done that. She's bought some online.

My other daughter didn't really have any formal training, only the training that she got at home and at school, and she is an expert in making all kinds of things. She's made wallets. She's made backpacks. She's made a lot of different things that I never attempted. Right now, she is working on putting quilts together. She does not do any hand quilting. But she loves Batiks, and she seems to specialize in the Batik fabrics and has recently bought online a group of fabrics to put these quilts together along with the pattern. And they are very interesting--probably cost a lot more than the ones that I do because I don't buy fabric in the quilt shop very often, unless I need a particular print or a particular plain color. I'd rather buy fabrics in the regular fabric shops and be able to put it together for a reasonable price.

But they certainly are sewers. There is no doubt about it. Now the grandchildren, that's an entirely different story. Why should they sew when their parents have done this all along? Only recently, the oldest granddaughter [clock chimes.] was given a machine. And I'll tell you that that machine came from Marge. My daughter bought it from Marge Defler. [another member of BCQ.] And Laura has just made Raggedy Ann dolls, which I didn't get to see. They've been given away. But she has taken an interest in doing that, and I think she may branch out and do different things.

The other two, who are still in school, have not really started to do anything like that. But they may well do it because they have special needs. They are very tall, and they have a difficult time buying pants and clothing that have long enough legs and long enough arms.

ES: Have you entered any shows?

JM: I have had a few quilts on display but it's not the thing that interests me as far as quilting goes. I think that the reason I put these into the quilt show was because they needed something to fill the space.

ES: Would this have been at one of the state fairs or at Bear Canyon?

JM: It was basically through the Seniors. They have a Prime-Time exposition, and they would request quilts to put in that, but they're not doing that anymore. But they did that for quite a few years. And I just feel that sometimes when quilts are judged that it's just like your teacher [clock chimes.] in high school or in college who is judging because of her own qualifications and her own interests. And it doesn't really put the value on the written material or on the creative material that should be put on it.

I mean, sometimes when you see the old quilts that maybe were made by people who lived in an area where they did not have access to fabric or had access to pieces of old fabric and they put them together. They used to look at them in an entirely different way because they may not even be beautiful, but yet they were useful and that's what happened when the first quilters came to this country. There wasn't fabric available in this country at that time for two or three years until they grew the flax and the cotton and in order to make fabric on their own, because importing it was so expensive.

So, what they had to do was, they brought quilts over with them or brought fabric with them in their clothing and then when that began to wear out, they would put it together and make quilts out of that. And instead of cutting it out to make fancy designs, they wanted to use every bit of it, so some of these might be cut on angles that are not really a beautiful design.

And I think that quilting came into existence in Europe because the men who were going off to fight battles in the Middle East wore chain mail and armor. And they needed something under the chain mail or the armor to protect them from rubbing on their skin and so they started by putting padding in there and did very straight up and down stitching to hold it in place. And then, it became much more decorative because people when they see that they can do something like that in straight lines, they realized that they can make it a lot prettier than that. That's how quilting really came into existence--to hold together those pieces of fabric that they needed for warmth or for protection. It's interesting to read the history.

And then what was interesting about that is at that time, I think it was in the sixteenth century, Europe was quite warm, and then they had a real change in temperature, so that they needed a lot more warm clothing in Europe and so this thing that developed into just protection for under the armor generated the need for warm quilts and warm clothing.

ES: Have you done any teaching, per se?

JM: I did have a couple of classes. One was at a women's group that met in a church. I taught very simple quilting there. And also, at my own church, we have done some quilting with people who thought they might be interested and then at the senior center, I ran a class at one time. And I can't say that any of these people from that group have ever joined the full-fledged quilters. They might do work on their own at home, but they haven't joined groups.

ES: Do you have an opinion about machine quilting versus hand quilting?

JM: I think that there are good reasons for both. One reason is that you can create things a lot faster if you need quilts for like the Ronald MacDonald House. It's hard to put fifty hours into something whereas you might be able to create something in twelve hours that can be given away like that and will still be appreciated and still be beautiful.

I guess I like the hand quilting because it doesn't look so false. If you look at something, you can tell right away if it has been hand quilted or machine quilted, if you know anything about quilting. My neighbor brought me a piece that she bought up in Pagosa Springs the other day that's very pretty. It's done with butterflies and the unbleached muslin and so forth. She fell in love with it up there and bought it and paid a fair amount of money for it. And it is all machine quilted. If you look at the back of it, you can see where they had to tie off the threads when they ended, so it decreases the beauty of the product, because I just love it when you can look at both sides of the quilt and see the quilting on both sides. It’s just as beautiful. You can use it one way on your bed in one week and turn it over and use it the other way the next week. So, I think that that's what's important to me.

ES: Do you have any advice for new quilters? [end of tape--a slight interruption.]

JM: I think that the advice that I would give would be to not start with anything that was too difficult, because I think you get very discouraged when you spend a lot of money and put a lot of time into something, and you are not going to get it finished in a year or two years. Maybe it will go into a UFO, your unfinished object box. And I have some things like that in my box. Not that they couldn't be finished, but I haven't finished them.

But I think is good to start with something fairly simple and something you can share with others. I think that one of the first projects we did was to do a group of Sampler squares and I chose to do them to give to other people, like to make pillows, to make wall hangings. Things like that. And that way, you build up your confidence that what you're doing is something worthwhile and is something you can share with others.

Then after you've done those, you go on to larger projects, like making a quilt. Which can be a very expensive thing to put together to get all the fabric for a quilt if you don't have a collection of pieces in your closet already. If you went out to buy the fabric in a quilt store, for a lot of these quilt projects, you would spend at least two hundred dollars on just the fabric today. And people say, 'What's the value of your quilt? How much time have you got in it?' There's no answer to how much time you have in it unless you punch a time clock each time you sit down or
each time you start.

ES: Have you ever estimated what you think the quilt takes for yourself?

JM: I haven't even really tried to do that because putting it together you might be able to figure your timing by writing down each day--when you put it together on the machine, or when you are doing the cutting. But have you thought about the time that you put into the planning? Have you thought about the time that you put into choosing the fabrics? I don't think you can put a time on that. A lot of people used to say that what they did was when they figured about how much time they spent on the hand quilting, they'd figure it out by how many spools of thread they used. It's very difficult to put a time on it.

ES: Sometimes I take how long it takes to do one square and then I can multiply by the number of squares and then I estimate other parts and can come up with something.

JM: That's true. You have to figure it as entertainment. [laughs.]

ES: Do you have any funny stories about quilts and what they've meant to people or some adventures you may have had along with quilts? [clock strikes.]

JM: One year, there were several babies born in the extended Moffatt family. So, I made quilts. I bought little teddy bear fabric, and I made Trip Around the World quilts with the teddy bear fabric. They were small. These were fussy cut. All done by hand. I think I made six of these, but the little pieces of teddy bear fabric kept getting smaller and smaller as the time went on. Both of my daughters had children the same year, my two daughters. And I think my son--no, his child was a little bit younger than that. Anyway, in the extended Moffatt family there were quite a few babies born. Each got a quilt. But the quilt that went to my grandson, Brendon. He's the oldest boy grandchild. He had one of the first ones. His mother appreciated it and he used it.

His younger brother was born about two years later, and Collin was a child that always had to have a blanket in his hand. And he called it his 'Geekie.' And he used this blanket until there was nothing left of it. Adria would wash it regularly and it was just in absolute shreds. [clock chimes.] And so, I can remember him calling me up one day when he was two or maybe three and he was coming out here to visit and he said, 'Grandma, I need a new Geekie.' At that time, I was moving into the house here. It was 1992. I didn't really have time to put together one like the one that was in shreds. So, I bought dinosaur material and just quilted around the dinosaurs and gave him that.

Those boys have always loved quilts. They wrap up in their quilts rather than sleeping in a bed under a sheet with a quilt, no. They sleep wrapped up in a quilt. A couple of quilts that I've made for them, I'm sure are kind of in rags. But they are both graduated from high school, and they had graduation quilts that they treasure and take with them to college.

ES: I think that's all I have for now to ask you. Is there anything else that you think of that you wanted to tell?

JM: Well, I think it's been so much a part of my life for the past thirty-five years and every minute that I have spent with it I have enjoyed. Oh. There are frustrations but you learn a lot along the way. And I have gathered a wonderful collection of friends who are interested in the same thing and I think that's very good.

ES: Thank you so much. It is very interesting, all the things that you have been telling.

JM: It is wonderful to do this.