Joyce Frashier
Photos
Identifier
NM87111-005
Interviewee
Joyce Cummings Frashier
Interviewer
Evelyn Salinger
Interview Date
12/8/08
Interview sponsor
Diane Metts
Location
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Transcriber
Evelyn Salinger
Transcription
Evelyn Salinger (ES): This is Evelyn Salinger, and I am conducting a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Joyce Cummings Frashier. Today's date is December 08, 2008, and it is approximately 2:15 p.m. We are at Joyce's home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Hi, Joyce.
Joyce Frashier (JF): Hello. Welcome.
ES: It's nice of you to agree to do this today. I know you have a very great interest in history, genealogy and families. First of all, I would like you to tell me what you have here to show us.
JF: This is what I consider the most important quilt in the house. It's from my husband's grandmother and the little blocks I was told by the lady who gave it to me that she designed the pattern. It's Ursula's Medallion. She was born in 1853 and she had pieced this quilt by the time she was sixteen, according to her own handwriting. And each little block has ninety-nine pieces.
ES: Oh, they are so tiny. How did she do that?
JF: I don't know. She had set them in muslin blocks and didn't ever get it quilted or put together and the family moved from Southern Iowa to Fayetteville, Arkansas, after the Civil War, approximately about 1866. They moved there and I don't know exactly why, but evidently these little blocks moved with her. In her own handwriting--a piece of paper that was given to me that I embroidered in her exact handwriting. It says, 'Pieced by Ursula Bishop at age 16 in 1869 and quilted later.' She had written that. Then her granddaughter, Laveda Sergeant, who was my husband's oldest cousin, completed it in 1988. By then, the little blocks had been transferred in her trunk from Iowa to Arkansas and then after her mother died, and she later on married a widower, my husband's grandfather, Alec Frashier, widower with three children, and they crossed from Arkansas by covered wagon to the Western slope of Colorado and homesteaded. So those blocks went there. They proved up on their homestead in Colorado and by then the train had come in to DeBeque, Colorado, where they homesteaded and they went out on the train, back to Arkansas. So the little blocks were in the trunk going back to Arkansas.
Then he made the Oklahoma land run. He rode on the mule to make the land run. His claim was taken away from him by Sooners, so the story goes, with guns and unlathered horses, so Grandpa ended that, buying a homestead in Oklahoma territory right after the land run. From there, their sons first went to the Texas Panhandle about 1910 and he later followed them, so the little blocks made another trip in her trunk.
Ursula had only had one daughter [Tinnie.]. She had three sons and one daughter and raised three stepchildren and this daughter had two daughters and two sons. And this was her, [Tinnie's.], oldest daughter, Laveda Sergeant, whom I met doing family history. And she found out both my interest in history and the fact that my husband was her youngest cousin, and she was the oldest. So, we had a sweet relationship by the time she died. I was with her when she died, or close to her death, and she called me--she was living in Amarillo at that time--and she called me one day and said, 'I want you to get over here and get this quilt. I want Gordon to have it.'
Now, she had taken the little blocks completely apart because the original muslin had rotted. So, she washed the little blocks and reset them in fresh muslin, put it together and she had it quilted by an Amish woman. And then she had it appraised. So, I have the appraisal by Sharon Neumann of Lubbock, Texas, who was a well-known quilt appraiser. She has since passed on. She appraised it on May the seventh 1988 and she valued the quilt at that time at twelve hundred dollars. It has been about twenty years ago.
And here's the description of her quilt, her evaluation and here's Laveda's comment: 'Mother gave me grandmother's quilt. I call it Ursula's Medallion. Mother said, I know you'll take care of them.' They were the little blocks. That meant more to me than even the quilt. 'My father, Fred Fendrick, and my mother were married January seventeenth, 1908, in Grandmother's parlor in a pretty Victorian house Grandfather built for Grandmother in Oklahoma territory.'
After the woman had all these trials and tribulations, she finally did have a grand house in Oklahoma. And I've got a picture of it in the family book. So, this documents the quilt, and these are the two women involved. And I have printed these pictures on the fabric paper, so I want to attach them to the quilt, also. And my daughters are interested in the quilt. I think it's a museum piece, probably, more than a family. I don't want it to go out of the family and not go to a museum. There is a museum in the Fayetteville, Arkansas, area. There is a grand museum I've visited there. But this is her in 1870 [photo.] in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and it was about the time that she would have completed the quilt. And this is her granddaughter at the time that she redid the quilt.
ES: She must have redone it just before she died. It is interesting the resemblance of the two.
JF: Well, she died in '99 at age 90 so she did this twelve years earlier.
ES: When you were talking about blocks, do you mean for instance the nine-inch block here? That's the muslin she took off, and then the center, all these little, teeny triangles, the ninety-nine of them remained intact?
JF: That stayed intact. She didn't take those apart. Just the little medallion was set in, I presume, a similar block.
ES: Whoever quilted this has the tiniest stitches.
JF: I don't know the name of the person who quilted it. I believe she was Amish, but Laveda sent away to have it quilted and chose very carefully who would quilt it because she wanted a beautiful job. Now she was a quilter herself and did exquisite needlework, but she hired it quilted because she wanted it very professionally done.
ES: I wonder if these pieces were samples snipped of things or if she had to cut each little triangle which is barely more than a half inch triangle--equilateral triangles.
JF: I presume she cut them all. These are civil war era fabrics.
ES: Yes. It is interesting because one here looks very familiar to me. I have one from 1932 that looks just like that.
JF: As far as I know, Laveda did not add any fabric at all to the little medallions. She saved all the medallions. She may have done some repair. These were what she had. As you will recall, in the civil war era, fabric was so scarce and so valuable. The little medallions just point out the value of fabric.
ES: It is very hard to see how they are sewn together.
JF: Not too long after I met Laveda, Gordon's cousin, she did make a sample block for me. I did not get it out. I have it in my cedar chest. But she was proving you could do it. She did actually copy a block for me. She was that kind of seamstress. At that time, I did not dream I'd end up owning it, because she has one niece that inherited all her things. And she had about four other beautiful, beautiful quilts her mother had done that were of this quality that she'd also had appraised. But she wanted Gordon to have this one. She was very impressed by my husband. She had two sons, his cousins, a year older and a year younger who both drowned when they were about five and eight. They drowned in a bar ditch around Easter in the Texas Panhandle. So, her meeting Gordon was--the family had not been close and had been kind of estranged. Now she saw Gordon. And the first time I took him over to her house was one of the sweetest times in my life. I could just see how close they were. So, the quilt has great meaning because she wanted him to have it. It was obviously one of her most valuable possessions. It is the oldest example of quilts. I've got some family quilts from other family lines, but this is my pride and joy.
ES: It may be very confusing for those hearing or reading what we are writing, but it would be interesting to hear of other historical people in your family who have done quilting. And then we can go into how or why or what you do.
JF: I found out that both of my husband's grandmothers quilted. This was his father's mother. And his mother's mother also quilted. Well, it skipped all the generations. His mother was not a quilter, his sisters were not quilters. So, it just sort of stopped in that family, until he married me. [laughs.] But in my family, both lines, both my father's and mother's lines have quilters--a long line of quilters. And I have a quilt made by my grandmothers on both sides. My dad came from a family of thirteen and all his six sisters quilted. One made her living as a widow, quilting. And most of my first cousins quilt in that family line and it's in us to quilt.
However, my mother had only one sister and her sister had no patience with quilting, so it came down to my mother. And then she passed it on to my sister and I, and we did very utilitarian quilting, mostly. Every once in a while, one turned out rather pretty, you know. [laughs.] But we had to have quilts for the family to stay warm. So, I have quilts all over the house. This [pointing to one nearby on the chair.] is one of the bunk house quilts. That's my favorite snuggie quilt. It's just wool scraps, just wool squares and quilted in the old missionary shell.
ES: Is the back a flannel?
JF: Yeah, it's a flannel.
ES: With stripes. This is nice. You just keep that to cozy up.
JF: Yeah, I have my mother's snuggie quilts. I enjoy--
ES: This is for the bunk house?
JF: This is a bunk house quilt. Well, we made utilitarian quilts to go in the bunk house for the hired hands. And we had to have lots of quilts in the Texas Panhandle to keep people warm.
ES: Were the houses that you lived in made of mud or logs?
JF: No, they were just frame houses, but they were not insulated very well out in the prairie. When my dad's people first came to the Texas Panhandle, they lived in dugouts. And that grandmother, his mother, had lots of utilitarian quilts and when I would go to spend time with her--when I was in school and the weather was bad, I'd stay in town. That grandmother would let me have all the quilts I wanted on my bed. And sometimes I'd sleep under six or eight. My mother limited them. She didn't think it was healthy to pile them up, but I loved sleeping under quilts. When I quilt, I have this kind of mystic feeling that I am connecting with all those women, all the quilters of all those generations.
ES: Would you tell me when you first started quilting?
JF: I started quilting about eleven or twelve years of age with my mother. She put me at a quilting frame, and we quilted. We did not do little, tiny stitches. We did fairly big stitches, but she taught me to quilt, and we got them out in a hurry. We had quilts in the frame. And I have one picture in my scrapbook there of Mother and I quilting. It was after we got cameras with flash bulbs.
ES: You have a wonderful, huge album here. I would like to have you tell us about that, because in here we will see evidence that you were quilting at a very young age. You have a picture in here.
JF: Yes, that was my mother and I quilting about 1947 or '48. I was a junior in high school and we were quilting the quilt that I've got a picture of on the other side. And that was a quilt that my grandmother Kirk, Roxie Kirk, my mother's mother, had pieced for me before she died. She died when I was about eleven and Mother had saved it. Mother had sent her scraps from my first-grade dresses, and I have some scraps in there from dresses I wore to first grade. I was the oldest grandchild, the first granddaughter, and no doubt she had intended to make quilts for all her grandchildren, but I was the only one that got one. That she made specifically for me.
ES: You have this wonderful album in which you document each quilt.
JF: I'm trying to document each quilt that I have in my inventory and that I've made. I've got two different sections. That second one was a quilt, a Lone Star quilt, that was pieced just by a friend in the church I grew up in and given to me as a wedding present and I had a quilting bee in Fort Collins, Colorado, and invited different ladies to quilt it. And it's been used. Both of these quilts have been used so much. They're pretty fragile. You can kind of regret that they are that fragile, however, every time that I made up the bed with my grandmother's quilt on it, I thought of her. And it was her memorial. And she would have wanted it used.
That's [points to another photo.] the first bed quilt that I made, and I took it back to the farm and Mother and I quilted it together. It's a wool quilt made out of scraps from my first professional wardrobe. [laughs.]
ES: What is your profession?
JF: Librarian. I was a librarian--first of my professional wool quilts. I put that one together the old-fashioned way, that Mother and I did, and I quilted in the shell, the old missionary shell and it’s on the bed that Gordon and I sleep under right now. It's one I pull out for the winter. It's a warmie.
ES: 1978. You have really been quilting a long time, piecing and quilting.
JF: I had my years when I didn't quilt, after I had my three babies. There were several years that I didn't quilt. But I kept piecing blocks.
ES: Are you caught up?
JF: Well, I'm not completely. Quilters don't be caught up; you know that. [laughs.] There's always other quilts that I want to do. I have finished a lot of other people's projects and quilted a lot of quilts that other people pieced.
ES: For a friend?
JF: For friend or relative or somebody would want something finished.
ES: Were you ever commissioned to do something?
JF: Not for pay. I've had people pay for the supplies to finish quilts, but I haven't ever gone through enough to accept money for it. I'm not that good.
ES: When did you really feel that you spent a lot of time with it? After your girls had grown up?
JF: And after I retired from my job. When I first started quilting again after the first grandchild was born, there was that old tradition. Every baby had to have a quilt made by his grandmother and I've got a picture in there working on my first grandbaby's first quilt. And that's what really got me started again. I bought a hoop to quilt it on the hoop.
ES: That's what I started on, too.
JF: My mother had bought some tops that one of my dad's brothers' wives had pieced and was selling. So, Mother bought me two or three tops and I quilted those full-size tops. They've been given to daughters. I do try to keep them thinned out some, but the purpose of that book would be that when it came time to divide my things, somebody would have some record of the quilts that are in the house, where they came from or the quilts I've made, where they went.
ES: Do you ever just take them all out and give a show to friends?
JF: Oh, once in a while there will be somebody who will be curious, you know.
ES: Maybe that is something one could do at meeting some time.
JF: Right.
ES: Maybe you would do something here rather than toting them all there.
When did you join the Bear Canyon Quilters?
JF: We moved back here from Texas. We both retired here and had to go back ten years to Texas to take care of my parents. Then we moved back in 2002. One of the ladies, Lora Lloyd, that I had worked with in the library, said, 'You must come to quilters with me.' She brought me to Bear Canyon [Senior Center.]. So it was in June of 2002 that I joined the Bear Canyon Quilters. And this was the first quilting group that I had ever had the time and opportunity to belong to and it's been a very precious association in my life.
ES: You were a lone quilter for half a century.
JF: Yes. I quilted or I went back and quilted with Mother. The ten years we were in the Panhandle, my hometown, I quilted fairly often with cousins. They would have a bee and invite all the cousins over to quilt on a quilt.
ES: I am curious about the bee. How long does it take to quilt a quilt when you do it in a quilt like that? Do you sit all day and quilt?
JF: I've never quilted in a bee where we turned out a quilt in a day, like the old-fashioned women did.
ES: It sounded like they did. How they did it.
JF: Now we quilted--all the quilts we did and the quilts my mother did we put in frames full size and quilted from the outside in. Mother always said, by the time you got around it once you were halfway done. You know as far as you could reach. And most of the time I quilted with Mother, we quilted in the shell which goes very fast. So, when I was working in the library here, like into quilting in that picture, the city gave the city employees their birthday holiday and I was wrapping vacation time around it in January. I'd take a quilt back and Mother and I would put it in and in three or four days. We would get it far enough along that I could bring it back and finish it here. The cousins, they would take maybe a couple of weeks to get a quilt out. There would never be more than four, five or six of us.
ES: Every day--
JF: Every day somebody would go. We'd go when we could.
ES: I see. That's nice when you are in town like that.
JF: In town or country. But most of them had a tradition that every child that got married had to have a hand quilted quilt. So they'd have the quilting bee to quilt the marriage quilt and the baby quilt.
ES: You seem to have come from a real tradition, the way we used to read about. People who do it nowadays, everybody does different things, like buying fabric and making a quilt in a day and stuff like that. What are your favorite techniques of quilting?
JF: I do piecework. I do very little appliqué. Most of the appliqué I do on the Center quilt, the one quilt that they sell chances on. I had never done any appliqué until I joined this group. So, what I know about appliqué, they have taught me. I have been telling people that one thing this group has done for me; I've had to unlearn all the things my mother taught me, just about [laughs.] because we did sort of rough utilitarian quilting and weren't as careful and didn't do as pretty a work. And my mother later on did some very pretty quilting. I have a Flower Garden that she quilted, and it is beautifully done. I have several nice quilts from her legacy as well as all these wonderful snuggie things that I use for warmth. A quilt just about everywhere in the winter.
ES: Do you do anything by machine?
JF: Yes. I piece by machine.
ES: Not all your quilts.
JF: Once in a while there will be one, I hand pieced. I hand pieced a couple of big Flower Gardens. I did a lot of work while I was traveling.
ES: I noticed your Winnebago outside.
JF: Yes.
ES: Do you do a lot of traveling in the country?
JF: Yes, we have. I usually saved hand work to do while I was traveling. My eyes have gotten to the point the last couple of years that it's kind of hard to quilt while we're in motion. I hem a lot of quilts and do some hand piecing. So, I'm doing more looking these days.
ES: When you're stopped some place--
JF: Oh, yes.
ES: If you've got the daylight still left then that's a good time to work outdoors.
JF: I have a series of pictures, I sort of planned with lots of quilts to finish the binding out in a special setting and that would be part of the story of the quilt, so I've got several quilts that I did that.
ES: That's a very good idea. Have you ever entered shows or won any awards or that sort of thing?
JF: Well, I have put some in the shows here in Albuquerque that didn't win any awards, but the Senior Affairs Department had a quilt show every year. And the first year I was here they wanted me to enter quilts and I had my two Golden Wedding Anniversary Quilts.
ES: Oh, yes.
JF: My sister had made one for me and then a group of relatives and friends had put one together that I later quilted. Those two were in that show. I think there was another one, but I haven't entered any since, except to casually show and tell with the quilters.
ES: Have you ever been a teacher?
JF: Not formally. We pass on what we know. You know how we do in our quilters' group and I kind of have been in the process of passing it on to my daughters a little bit. I've got two that are interested. I have one that took a quilting course back East when her husband was in the Marines. She made some beautiful purses and pillows and things. She definitely has the skill. She keeps wanting to--and she will be busy working lots of years yet. And then I have one in town who's getting ready to retire and I recently helped here tie a quilt. She is very interested. And I don't know whether she will follow through, but she says she's going to join the Quilters when she retires in about five years. We'll see if we can pass it on. She's very interested in taking up the tradition. All three of my daughters are very interested in quilts.
ES: Do you have grandkids that are old enough, now?
JF: Right. I have a grandson who married a woman who did not come from a quilting tradition, but she asked for a wedding quilt. She let me know through the grapevine she wanted a quilt for the wedding, so I did quilt a beautiful top that I had bought from Laveda. It's a pieced rose. It's a beautiful quilt. And it's a treasure. And she's had two babies and I made quilts for those babies, and I am very pleased how interested she is because those quilts come with them when they come back to Albuquerque. They call me 'Gigi' for great grandma. So, these great grandchildren bring their "Gigi" quilts back here. And they want another one.
The daughter and I completed a queen-sized tied comforter for her little grandson, my great grandson and gave it to him on Thanksgiving. And so they are quilt appreciators. And the grandsons, I have made them comforters with denim squares and practical quilts with a backing that reflects their taste--Dallas cowboys backing and that kind of thing.
ES: You are working on something here in your dining room.
JF: Yes. It's a little quilt projected for a possible great granddaughter someday. I have the little great grandsons. I told them when they were here--the first great granddaughter. I made quite a few little baby blankets and quilts for the babies at church. They have showers.
ES: I was going to ask you about your charity things that you do.
JF: Well, I've enjoyed working with the Bear Canyon Quilters in their Ronald MacDonald project to make the little quilts for the children who stay in the Ronald MacDonald house. And I started the project of taking all the bits and pieces of batting and making pillows out of some of the scraps of things. And I kind of enjoy it.
ES: I've seen several of your pillows. And will they also go to the Ronald MacDonald?
JF: Yes, I have about ten ready to stuff right now. [telephone rings.]
ES: You keep busy.
JF: They keep giving the little batting scraps and we get so many materials given to us. There's plenty to do. Then I have worked with projects where we taught fifth graders to make a quilt block and made a pillow. That's about the extent. I've always been active in church and there's always lots of baby showers. [answering machine.]
ES: What is your opinion of machine quilting versus hand quilting? Do you do either or both of those?
JF: Well, I have machine quilted two quilts. I think it’s a wonderful method if you know how to do it, for children. That way they can freely wear them out. You don't have all the time and they're not so fragile as things that are hand quilted. I like the Zen of hand quilting. It's very relaxing and very therapeutic.
ES: Is that the favorite part of quilt making? Or do you have other favorite parts?
JF: I enjoy the putting the pattern together. I enjoy assembling it and you've got the drudgery of getting it into the frame and then the quilting. I feel very uncomfortable if I don't have a quilt in the frame. And I will go to all kinds of means, ends, to have one ready to put in the frame before I take one out, because I don't feel comfortable. When I can't sleep at night, I'll get up and quilt awhile. I'm an early riser and I like to quilt and watch the dawn. And I like to quilt and watch the sunset. So, I’m not too hung up on all this beautiful, beautiful machine quilting people do rather than hand quilting. I have had a couple, three, machine quilted--paid to have them quilted, things I wanted to get done in a hurry and did not want to invest the time. Because it will take quite an investment of time to hand quilt a quilt.
ES: How many hours a day do you figure you work on a quilt?
JF: When I've been pushing, I can't quilt much more than six hours a day. You just beat up your hands if I try to quilt more than six hours a day. Now, I have pushed it to seven or eight when I was really trying to get one out, but I take some time, not much straight. I like to listen to talking books when I quilt.
ES: You can have two joys at once.
JF: Yeah, two joys at once. So, you feel like you have accomplished something while you're also quilting, but I know there are quilters that quilt a lot longer hours than that, but I found six hours is just about the maximum the hands will take.
ES: Do you have any advice for new quilters?
JF: Other than sharing my enthusiasm for the person who really loves fabric and loves design, I guess the best advice would be, try to finish. 'Finish' is the most beautiful word in the quilting language. [laughs.] And I know very disciplined quilters who try to not start something before they finish something. Sometimes, it is just absolutely irresistible. You just have to start another one. So, I've probably got at least four or five in various stages at any given time. So, I would advise someone to carefully count the cost both in time and effort of what you start. Of course, you can always scale it back and make a pillow out of it or a lap quilt.
Something you have to watch is how much you invest in fabric and get to the point that you need to stay out of quilt fabric shops [laughs.] and finish things up. Encouraging anybody that's interested in quilting to get started. I think if they are just fishing around for something to start, the old nine patch pattern is--I have a big box of nine patch scraps in there. I decided I'd try to make perfect nine patch blocks. And it's hard to make perfect nine patch blocks and make all the corners meet.
There are many ways that a nine patch can be put together and it makes good use of your scraps. I'm definitely a scrappy person rather than a buying new fabric person. I rarely buy new fabric for the quilt other than the lining.
ES: Did you inherit from your relatives any of their scraps?
JF: Yes. I have a box of 1930's fabrics, a small box. Then from my mother I inherited a lot of the chicken feed sacks from the 30's and 40's.
ES: Those are so special.
JF: I don't do much with them. Most of them, I send back to my sister who's in the business--the antiques business. She and her husband have a booth in quilt shows and they sell the feed sack squares. And she said we have Mother's feed sack quilts and I do have several of Mother's that have quite a few feed sacks in them. In fact, the Lone Star Wedding quilt that I quilted in the quilting bee, the lining is chicken feed sack, green checked chicken feed sack that I happened to have.
ES: Does it show through a little bit?
JF: No. It doesn't show through, but the back is chicken feed sacks. So, I inherited a lot of those through the years then relatives' stashes sort of show up in my stash.
ES: Have you had any funny experiences or anything else you would like to share or anything that we have not touched upon?
JF: Stories. I guess there's two quilts that got away, that kind of haunt me.
ES: What's that?
JF: Well, before I went to college, my mother--we finished my grandmother's quilt for me to take and we also made a wool quilt. And she bought a wool batting for it. It was wool squares and then a cotton flannel lining. It was the warmest, wonderful quilt. It got me through blizzards in college. It was one of my treasures. And I had a daughter that took it on a picnic when she was a teenager and didn't come home with it. And I never could track it down. So that's one that got away.
And then my grandmother Cummings, my dad's mother, had made us a quilt for our wedding. It was just a simple little nine patch and it was on a hide-a-bed that I sold at a garage sale when we were moving. It did not dawn on me until a couple of years later that grandma's quilt was in that hide-a-bed, and I couldn't track it down. So, quilts get away, you know.
ES: They do.
JF: Ten years ago, I made a list when I was out on a road trip, of the quilts that I had. And I could remember thirty that I had in the house. So, the fact that two got away is not that big a deal.
ES: You have given a lot away. Thirty in your house that doesn't even touch what you have made.
JF: No. I've given away quite a few. The girls will come and ask for one.
ES: Your whole family has gotten involved.
JF: My husband is very interested in the quilts, and he enjoys having quilts on his bed to sleep under. And he appreciates them and when I change them and put the summer quilts on--when I change and put a fresh quilt on the bed, he notices.
ES: You say summer quilts and winter quilts. What do you have that's different about them?
JF: Well, the summer quilts are just very light weight.
ES: Is there a batting inside?
JF: There just a light batting. Winter quilts, we buy the thick, thick batting. I've quilted through. Now the quilters at Bear Canyon won't quilt through the thick, thick battings, you know.
ES: I've never had a thick one.
JF: We always went for warmth, you know. So even the pretty ones, we buy the thick, thick batting and quilt it.
ES: Even the wool ones, you quilt those by hand?
JF: Uh hum.
ES: It must be very hard to go up and down two or three times. Do you just go up or down and that's it?
JF: Yeah. This one was quilted pretty big. My mother quilted it. I have mended and requited this one. And in fact, I have a grandson that just turned thirteen, that was here for Christmas two years ago. And I had that one on the couch and he'd loved it and he wanted to take it home with him. He'd loved the fact that it was the bunk house quilt, supposedly that the cowboys and the hired hands used. And so, I have it written in a codicil to our will of who gets what that he gets the bunk house quilt. So, I have to be careful not to wear it out, I guess. Jared wants the bunk house quilt. I've made him other quilts.
ES: If there's nothing else at the moment that we can think of, I want to thank you so much for talking today. You have such an interest and so much history in your family.
JF: It's been a pleasure. It's the old-fashioned kind of utilitarian history.
ES: That's very nice. Thank you very much.
Hi, Joyce.
Joyce Frashier (JF): Hello. Welcome.
ES: It's nice of you to agree to do this today. I know you have a very great interest in history, genealogy and families. First of all, I would like you to tell me what you have here to show us.
JF: This is what I consider the most important quilt in the house. It's from my husband's grandmother and the little blocks I was told by the lady who gave it to me that she designed the pattern. It's Ursula's Medallion. She was born in 1853 and she had pieced this quilt by the time she was sixteen, according to her own handwriting. And each little block has ninety-nine pieces.
ES: Oh, they are so tiny. How did she do that?
JF: I don't know. She had set them in muslin blocks and didn't ever get it quilted or put together and the family moved from Southern Iowa to Fayetteville, Arkansas, after the Civil War, approximately about 1866. They moved there and I don't know exactly why, but evidently these little blocks moved with her. In her own handwriting--a piece of paper that was given to me that I embroidered in her exact handwriting. It says, 'Pieced by Ursula Bishop at age 16 in 1869 and quilted later.' She had written that. Then her granddaughter, Laveda Sergeant, who was my husband's oldest cousin, completed it in 1988. By then, the little blocks had been transferred in her trunk from Iowa to Arkansas and then after her mother died, and she later on married a widower, my husband's grandfather, Alec Frashier, widower with three children, and they crossed from Arkansas by covered wagon to the Western slope of Colorado and homesteaded. So those blocks went there. They proved up on their homestead in Colorado and by then the train had come in to DeBeque, Colorado, where they homesteaded and they went out on the train, back to Arkansas. So the little blocks were in the trunk going back to Arkansas.
Then he made the Oklahoma land run. He rode on the mule to make the land run. His claim was taken away from him by Sooners, so the story goes, with guns and unlathered horses, so Grandpa ended that, buying a homestead in Oklahoma territory right after the land run. From there, their sons first went to the Texas Panhandle about 1910 and he later followed them, so the little blocks made another trip in her trunk.
Ursula had only had one daughter [Tinnie.]. She had three sons and one daughter and raised three stepchildren and this daughter had two daughters and two sons. And this was her, [Tinnie's.], oldest daughter, Laveda Sergeant, whom I met doing family history. And she found out both my interest in history and the fact that my husband was her youngest cousin, and she was the oldest. So, we had a sweet relationship by the time she died. I was with her when she died, or close to her death, and she called me--she was living in Amarillo at that time--and she called me one day and said, 'I want you to get over here and get this quilt. I want Gordon to have it.'
Now, she had taken the little blocks completely apart because the original muslin had rotted. So, she washed the little blocks and reset them in fresh muslin, put it together and she had it quilted by an Amish woman. And then she had it appraised. So, I have the appraisal by Sharon Neumann of Lubbock, Texas, who was a well-known quilt appraiser. She has since passed on. She appraised it on May the seventh 1988 and she valued the quilt at that time at twelve hundred dollars. It has been about twenty years ago.
And here's the description of her quilt, her evaluation and here's Laveda's comment: 'Mother gave me grandmother's quilt. I call it Ursula's Medallion. Mother said, I know you'll take care of them.' They were the little blocks. That meant more to me than even the quilt. 'My father, Fred Fendrick, and my mother were married January seventeenth, 1908, in Grandmother's parlor in a pretty Victorian house Grandfather built for Grandmother in Oklahoma territory.'
After the woman had all these trials and tribulations, she finally did have a grand house in Oklahoma. And I've got a picture of it in the family book. So, this documents the quilt, and these are the two women involved. And I have printed these pictures on the fabric paper, so I want to attach them to the quilt, also. And my daughters are interested in the quilt. I think it's a museum piece, probably, more than a family. I don't want it to go out of the family and not go to a museum. There is a museum in the Fayetteville, Arkansas, area. There is a grand museum I've visited there. But this is her in 1870 [photo.] in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and it was about the time that she would have completed the quilt. And this is her granddaughter at the time that she redid the quilt.
ES: She must have redone it just before she died. It is interesting the resemblance of the two.
JF: Well, she died in '99 at age 90 so she did this twelve years earlier.
ES: When you were talking about blocks, do you mean for instance the nine-inch block here? That's the muslin she took off, and then the center, all these little, teeny triangles, the ninety-nine of them remained intact?
JF: That stayed intact. She didn't take those apart. Just the little medallion was set in, I presume, a similar block.
ES: Whoever quilted this has the tiniest stitches.
JF: I don't know the name of the person who quilted it. I believe she was Amish, but Laveda sent away to have it quilted and chose very carefully who would quilt it because she wanted a beautiful job. Now she was a quilter herself and did exquisite needlework, but she hired it quilted because she wanted it very professionally done.
ES: I wonder if these pieces were samples snipped of things or if she had to cut each little triangle which is barely more than a half inch triangle--equilateral triangles.
JF: I presume she cut them all. These are civil war era fabrics.
ES: Yes. It is interesting because one here looks very familiar to me. I have one from 1932 that looks just like that.
JF: As far as I know, Laveda did not add any fabric at all to the little medallions. She saved all the medallions. She may have done some repair. These were what she had. As you will recall, in the civil war era, fabric was so scarce and so valuable. The little medallions just point out the value of fabric.
ES: It is very hard to see how they are sewn together.
JF: Not too long after I met Laveda, Gordon's cousin, she did make a sample block for me. I did not get it out. I have it in my cedar chest. But she was proving you could do it. She did actually copy a block for me. She was that kind of seamstress. At that time, I did not dream I'd end up owning it, because she has one niece that inherited all her things. And she had about four other beautiful, beautiful quilts her mother had done that were of this quality that she'd also had appraised. But she wanted Gordon to have this one. She was very impressed by my husband. She had two sons, his cousins, a year older and a year younger who both drowned when they were about five and eight. They drowned in a bar ditch around Easter in the Texas Panhandle. So, her meeting Gordon was--the family had not been close and had been kind of estranged. Now she saw Gordon. And the first time I took him over to her house was one of the sweetest times in my life. I could just see how close they were. So, the quilt has great meaning because she wanted him to have it. It was obviously one of her most valuable possessions. It is the oldest example of quilts. I've got some family quilts from other family lines, but this is my pride and joy.
ES: It may be very confusing for those hearing or reading what we are writing, but it would be interesting to hear of other historical people in your family who have done quilting. And then we can go into how or why or what you do.
JF: I found out that both of my husband's grandmothers quilted. This was his father's mother. And his mother's mother also quilted. Well, it skipped all the generations. His mother was not a quilter, his sisters were not quilters. So, it just sort of stopped in that family, until he married me. [laughs.] But in my family, both lines, both my father's and mother's lines have quilters--a long line of quilters. And I have a quilt made by my grandmothers on both sides. My dad came from a family of thirteen and all his six sisters quilted. One made her living as a widow, quilting. And most of my first cousins quilt in that family line and it's in us to quilt.
However, my mother had only one sister and her sister had no patience with quilting, so it came down to my mother. And then she passed it on to my sister and I, and we did very utilitarian quilting, mostly. Every once in a while, one turned out rather pretty, you know. [laughs.] But we had to have quilts for the family to stay warm. So, I have quilts all over the house. This [pointing to one nearby on the chair.] is one of the bunk house quilts. That's my favorite snuggie quilt. It's just wool scraps, just wool squares and quilted in the old missionary shell.
ES: Is the back a flannel?
JF: Yeah, it's a flannel.
ES: With stripes. This is nice. You just keep that to cozy up.
JF: Yeah, I have my mother's snuggie quilts. I enjoy--
ES: This is for the bunk house?
JF: This is a bunk house quilt. Well, we made utilitarian quilts to go in the bunk house for the hired hands. And we had to have lots of quilts in the Texas Panhandle to keep people warm.
ES: Were the houses that you lived in made of mud or logs?
JF: No, they were just frame houses, but they were not insulated very well out in the prairie. When my dad's people first came to the Texas Panhandle, they lived in dugouts. And that grandmother, his mother, had lots of utilitarian quilts and when I would go to spend time with her--when I was in school and the weather was bad, I'd stay in town. That grandmother would let me have all the quilts I wanted on my bed. And sometimes I'd sleep under six or eight. My mother limited them. She didn't think it was healthy to pile them up, but I loved sleeping under quilts. When I quilt, I have this kind of mystic feeling that I am connecting with all those women, all the quilters of all those generations.
ES: Would you tell me when you first started quilting?
JF: I started quilting about eleven or twelve years of age with my mother. She put me at a quilting frame, and we quilted. We did not do little, tiny stitches. We did fairly big stitches, but she taught me to quilt, and we got them out in a hurry. We had quilts in the frame. And I have one picture in my scrapbook there of Mother and I quilting. It was after we got cameras with flash bulbs.
ES: You have a wonderful, huge album here. I would like to have you tell us about that, because in here we will see evidence that you were quilting at a very young age. You have a picture in here.
JF: Yes, that was my mother and I quilting about 1947 or '48. I was a junior in high school and we were quilting the quilt that I've got a picture of on the other side. And that was a quilt that my grandmother Kirk, Roxie Kirk, my mother's mother, had pieced for me before she died. She died when I was about eleven and Mother had saved it. Mother had sent her scraps from my first-grade dresses, and I have some scraps in there from dresses I wore to first grade. I was the oldest grandchild, the first granddaughter, and no doubt she had intended to make quilts for all her grandchildren, but I was the only one that got one. That she made specifically for me.
ES: You have this wonderful album in which you document each quilt.
JF: I'm trying to document each quilt that I have in my inventory and that I've made. I've got two different sections. That second one was a quilt, a Lone Star quilt, that was pieced just by a friend in the church I grew up in and given to me as a wedding present and I had a quilting bee in Fort Collins, Colorado, and invited different ladies to quilt it. And it's been used. Both of these quilts have been used so much. They're pretty fragile. You can kind of regret that they are that fragile, however, every time that I made up the bed with my grandmother's quilt on it, I thought of her. And it was her memorial. And she would have wanted it used.
That's [points to another photo.] the first bed quilt that I made, and I took it back to the farm and Mother and I quilted it together. It's a wool quilt made out of scraps from my first professional wardrobe. [laughs.]
ES: What is your profession?
JF: Librarian. I was a librarian--first of my professional wool quilts. I put that one together the old-fashioned way, that Mother and I did, and I quilted in the shell, the old missionary shell and it’s on the bed that Gordon and I sleep under right now. It's one I pull out for the winter. It's a warmie.
ES: 1978. You have really been quilting a long time, piecing and quilting.
JF: I had my years when I didn't quilt, after I had my three babies. There were several years that I didn't quilt. But I kept piecing blocks.
ES: Are you caught up?
JF: Well, I'm not completely. Quilters don't be caught up; you know that. [laughs.] There's always other quilts that I want to do. I have finished a lot of other people's projects and quilted a lot of quilts that other people pieced.
ES: For a friend?
JF: For friend or relative or somebody would want something finished.
ES: Were you ever commissioned to do something?
JF: Not for pay. I've had people pay for the supplies to finish quilts, but I haven't ever gone through enough to accept money for it. I'm not that good.
ES: When did you really feel that you spent a lot of time with it? After your girls had grown up?
JF: And after I retired from my job. When I first started quilting again after the first grandchild was born, there was that old tradition. Every baby had to have a quilt made by his grandmother and I've got a picture in there working on my first grandbaby's first quilt. And that's what really got me started again. I bought a hoop to quilt it on the hoop.
ES: That's what I started on, too.
JF: My mother had bought some tops that one of my dad's brothers' wives had pieced and was selling. So, Mother bought me two or three tops and I quilted those full-size tops. They've been given to daughters. I do try to keep them thinned out some, but the purpose of that book would be that when it came time to divide my things, somebody would have some record of the quilts that are in the house, where they came from or the quilts I've made, where they went.
ES: Do you ever just take them all out and give a show to friends?
JF: Oh, once in a while there will be somebody who will be curious, you know.
ES: Maybe that is something one could do at meeting some time.
JF: Right.
ES: Maybe you would do something here rather than toting them all there.
When did you join the Bear Canyon Quilters?
JF: We moved back here from Texas. We both retired here and had to go back ten years to Texas to take care of my parents. Then we moved back in 2002. One of the ladies, Lora Lloyd, that I had worked with in the library, said, 'You must come to quilters with me.' She brought me to Bear Canyon [Senior Center.]. So it was in June of 2002 that I joined the Bear Canyon Quilters. And this was the first quilting group that I had ever had the time and opportunity to belong to and it's been a very precious association in my life.
ES: You were a lone quilter for half a century.
JF: Yes. I quilted or I went back and quilted with Mother. The ten years we were in the Panhandle, my hometown, I quilted fairly often with cousins. They would have a bee and invite all the cousins over to quilt on a quilt.
ES: I am curious about the bee. How long does it take to quilt a quilt when you do it in a quilt like that? Do you sit all day and quilt?
JF: I've never quilted in a bee where we turned out a quilt in a day, like the old-fashioned women did.
ES: It sounded like they did. How they did it.
JF: Now we quilted--all the quilts we did and the quilts my mother did we put in frames full size and quilted from the outside in. Mother always said, by the time you got around it once you were halfway done. You know as far as you could reach. And most of the time I quilted with Mother, we quilted in the shell which goes very fast. So, when I was working in the library here, like into quilting in that picture, the city gave the city employees their birthday holiday and I was wrapping vacation time around it in January. I'd take a quilt back and Mother and I would put it in and in three or four days. We would get it far enough along that I could bring it back and finish it here. The cousins, they would take maybe a couple of weeks to get a quilt out. There would never be more than four, five or six of us.
ES: Every day--
JF: Every day somebody would go. We'd go when we could.
ES: I see. That's nice when you are in town like that.
JF: In town or country. But most of them had a tradition that every child that got married had to have a hand quilted quilt. So they'd have the quilting bee to quilt the marriage quilt and the baby quilt.
ES: You seem to have come from a real tradition, the way we used to read about. People who do it nowadays, everybody does different things, like buying fabric and making a quilt in a day and stuff like that. What are your favorite techniques of quilting?
JF: I do piecework. I do very little appliqué. Most of the appliqué I do on the Center quilt, the one quilt that they sell chances on. I had never done any appliqué until I joined this group. So, what I know about appliqué, they have taught me. I have been telling people that one thing this group has done for me; I've had to unlearn all the things my mother taught me, just about [laughs.] because we did sort of rough utilitarian quilting and weren't as careful and didn't do as pretty a work. And my mother later on did some very pretty quilting. I have a Flower Garden that she quilted, and it is beautifully done. I have several nice quilts from her legacy as well as all these wonderful snuggie things that I use for warmth. A quilt just about everywhere in the winter.
ES: Do you do anything by machine?
JF: Yes. I piece by machine.
ES: Not all your quilts.
JF: Once in a while there will be one, I hand pieced. I hand pieced a couple of big Flower Gardens. I did a lot of work while I was traveling.
ES: I noticed your Winnebago outside.
JF: Yes.
ES: Do you do a lot of traveling in the country?
JF: Yes, we have. I usually saved hand work to do while I was traveling. My eyes have gotten to the point the last couple of years that it's kind of hard to quilt while we're in motion. I hem a lot of quilts and do some hand piecing. So, I'm doing more looking these days.
ES: When you're stopped some place--
JF: Oh, yes.
ES: If you've got the daylight still left then that's a good time to work outdoors.
JF: I have a series of pictures, I sort of planned with lots of quilts to finish the binding out in a special setting and that would be part of the story of the quilt, so I've got several quilts that I did that.
ES: That's a very good idea. Have you ever entered shows or won any awards or that sort of thing?
JF: Well, I have put some in the shows here in Albuquerque that didn't win any awards, but the Senior Affairs Department had a quilt show every year. And the first year I was here they wanted me to enter quilts and I had my two Golden Wedding Anniversary Quilts.
ES: Oh, yes.
JF: My sister had made one for me and then a group of relatives and friends had put one together that I later quilted. Those two were in that show. I think there was another one, but I haven't entered any since, except to casually show and tell with the quilters.
ES: Have you ever been a teacher?
JF: Not formally. We pass on what we know. You know how we do in our quilters' group and I kind of have been in the process of passing it on to my daughters a little bit. I've got two that are interested. I have one that took a quilting course back East when her husband was in the Marines. She made some beautiful purses and pillows and things. She definitely has the skill. She keeps wanting to--and she will be busy working lots of years yet. And then I have one in town who's getting ready to retire and I recently helped here tie a quilt. She is very interested. And I don't know whether she will follow through, but she says she's going to join the Quilters when she retires in about five years. We'll see if we can pass it on. She's very interested in taking up the tradition. All three of my daughters are very interested in quilts.
ES: Do you have grandkids that are old enough, now?
JF: Right. I have a grandson who married a woman who did not come from a quilting tradition, but she asked for a wedding quilt. She let me know through the grapevine she wanted a quilt for the wedding, so I did quilt a beautiful top that I had bought from Laveda. It's a pieced rose. It's a beautiful quilt. And it's a treasure. And she's had two babies and I made quilts for those babies, and I am very pleased how interested she is because those quilts come with them when they come back to Albuquerque. They call me 'Gigi' for great grandma. So, these great grandchildren bring their "Gigi" quilts back here. And they want another one.
The daughter and I completed a queen-sized tied comforter for her little grandson, my great grandson and gave it to him on Thanksgiving. And so they are quilt appreciators. And the grandsons, I have made them comforters with denim squares and practical quilts with a backing that reflects their taste--Dallas cowboys backing and that kind of thing.
ES: You are working on something here in your dining room.
JF: Yes. It's a little quilt projected for a possible great granddaughter someday. I have the little great grandsons. I told them when they were here--the first great granddaughter. I made quite a few little baby blankets and quilts for the babies at church. They have showers.
ES: I was going to ask you about your charity things that you do.
JF: Well, I've enjoyed working with the Bear Canyon Quilters in their Ronald MacDonald project to make the little quilts for the children who stay in the Ronald MacDonald house. And I started the project of taking all the bits and pieces of batting and making pillows out of some of the scraps of things. And I kind of enjoy it.
ES: I've seen several of your pillows. And will they also go to the Ronald MacDonald?
JF: Yes, I have about ten ready to stuff right now. [telephone rings.]
ES: You keep busy.
JF: They keep giving the little batting scraps and we get so many materials given to us. There's plenty to do. Then I have worked with projects where we taught fifth graders to make a quilt block and made a pillow. That's about the extent. I've always been active in church and there's always lots of baby showers. [answering machine.]
ES: What is your opinion of machine quilting versus hand quilting? Do you do either or both of those?
JF: Well, I have machine quilted two quilts. I think it’s a wonderful method if you know how to do it, for children. That way they can freely wear them out. You don't have all the time and they're not so fragile as things that are hand quilted. I like the Zen of hand quilting. It's very relaxing and very therapeutic.
ES: Is that the favorite part of quilt making? Or do you have other favorite parts?
JF: I enjoy the putting the pattern together. I enjoy assembling it and you've got the drudgery of getting it into the frame and then the quilting. I feel very uncomfortable if I don't have a quilt in the frame. And I will go to all kinds of means, ends, to have one ready to put in the frame before I take one out, because I don't feel comfortable. When I can't sleep at night, I'll get up and quilt awhile. I'm an early riser and I like to quilt and watch the dawn. And I like to quilt and watch the sunset. So, I’m not too hung up on all this beautiful, beautiful machine quilting people do rather than hand quilting. I have had a couple, three, machine quilted--paid to have them quilted, things I wanted to get done in a hurry and did not want to invest the time. Because it will take quite an investment of time to hand quilt a quilt.
ES: How many hours a day do you figure you work on a quilt?
JF: When I've been pushing, I can't quilt much more than six hours a day. You just beat up your hands if I try to quilt more than six hours a day. Now, I have pushed it to seven or eight when I was really trying to get one out, but I take some time, not much straight. I like to listen to talking books when I quilt.
ES: You can have two joys at once.
JF: Yeah, two joys at once. So, you feel like you have accomplished something while you're also quilting, but I know there are quilters that quilt a lot longer hours than that, but I found six hours is just about the maximum the hands will take.
ES: Do you have any advice for new quilters?
JF: Other than sharing my enthusiasm for the person who really loves fabric and loves design, I guess the best advice would be, try to finish. 'Finish' is the most beautiful word in the quilting language. [laughs.] And I know very disciplined quilters who try to not start something before they finish something. Sometimes, it is just absolutely irresistible. You just have to start another one. So, I've probably got at least four or five in various stages at any given time. So, I would advise someone to carefully count the cost both in time and effort of what you start. Of course, you can always scale it back and make a pillow out of it or a lap quilt.
Something you have to watch is how much you invest in fabric and get to the point that you need to stay out of quilt fabric shops [laughs.] and finish things up. Encouraging anybody that's interested in quilting to get started. I think if they are just fishing around for something to start, the old nine patch pattern is--I have a big box of nine patch scraps in there. I decided I'd try to make perfect nine patch blocks. And it's hard to make perfect nine patch blocks and make all the corners meet.
There are many ways that a nine patch can be put together and it makes good use of your scraps. I'm definitely a scrappy person rather than a buying new fabric person. I rarely buy new fabric for the quilt other than the lining.
ES: Did you inherit from your relatives any of their scraps?
JF: Yes. I have a box of 1930's fabrics, a small box. Then from my mother I inherited a lot of the chicken feed sacks from the 30's and 40's.
ES: Those are so special.
JF: I don't do much with them. Most of them, I send back to my sister who's in the business--the antiques business. She and her husband have a booth in quilt shows and they sell the feed sack squares. And she said we have Mother's feed sack quilts and I do have several of Mother's that have quite a few feed sacks in them. In fact, the Lone Star Wedding quilt that I quilted in the quilting bee, the lining is chicken feed sack, green checked chicken feed sack that I happened to have.
ES: Does it show through a little bit?
JF: No. It doesn't show through, but the back is chicken feed sacks. So, I inherited a lot of those through the years then relatives' stashes sort of show up in my stash.
ES: Have you had any funny experiences or anything else you would like to share or anything that we have not touched upon?
JF: Stories. I guess there's two quilts that got away, that kind of haunt me.
ES: What's that?
JF: Well, before I went to college, my mother--we finished my grandmother's quilt for me to take and we also made a wool quilt. And she bought a wool batting for it. It was wool squares and then a cotton flannel lining. It was the warmest, wonderful quilt. It got me through blizzards in college. It was one of my treasures. And I had a daughter that took it on a picnic when she was a teenager and didn't come home with it. And I never could track it down. So that's one that got away.
And then my grandmother Cummings, my dad's mother, had made us a quilt for our wedding. It was just a simple little nine patch and it was on a hide-a-bed that I sold at a garage sale when we were moving. It did not dawn on me until a couple of years later that grandma's quilt was in that hide-a-bed, and I couldn't track it down. So, quilts get away, you know.
ES: They do.
JF: Ten years ago, I made a list when I was out on a road trip, of the quilts that I had. And I could remember thirty that I had in the house. So, the fact that two got away is not that big a deal.
ES: You have given a lot away. Thirty in your house that doesn't even touch what you have made.
JF: No. I've given away quite a few. The girls will come and ask for one.
ES: Your whole family has gotten involved.
JF: My husband is very interested in the quilts, and he enjoys having quilts on his bed to sleep under. And he appreciates them and when I change them and put the summer quilts on--when I change and put a fresh quilt on the bed, he notices.
ES: You say summer quilts and winter quilts. What do you have that's different about them?
JF: Well, the summer quilts are just very light weight.
ES: Is there a batting inside?
JF: There just a light batting. Winter quilts, we buy the thick, thick batting. I've quilted through. Now the quilters at Bear Canyon won't quilt through the thick, thick battings, you know.
ES: I've never had a thick one.
JF: We always went for warmth, you know. So even the pretty ones, we buy the thick, thick batting and quilt it.
ES: Even the wool ones, you quilt those by hand?
JF: Uh hum.
ES: It must be very hard to go up and down two or three times. Do you just go up or down and that's it?
JF: Yeah. This one was quilted pretty big. My mother quilted it. I have mended and requited this one. And in fact, I have a grandson that just turned thirteen, that was here for Christmas two years ago. And I had that one on the couch and he'd loved it and he wanted to take it home with him. He'd loved the fact that it was the bunk house quilt, supposedly that the cowboys and the hired hands used. And so, I have it written in a codicil to our will of who gets what that he gets the bunk house quilt. So, I have to be careful not to wear it out, I guess. Jared wants the bunk house quilt. I've made him other quilts.
ES: If there's nothing else at the moment that we can think of, I want to thank you so much for talking today. You have such an interest and so much history in your family.
JF: It's been a pleasure. It's the old-fashioned kind of utilitarian history.
ES: That's very nice. Thank you very much.
Collection
Citation
“Joyce Frashier,” Quilters' S.O.S. -- Save Our Stories, accessed October 9, 2024, https://qsos.quiltalliance.org/items/show/1876.