On a recent Saturday ride-about, we took a big wool quilt in case we saw a spot for photos. We found a spot at Starr’s Mill, and gave Miss Nellie’s Country Garden some places to pose.
The quilt is my version of a pattern from Lisa Bongean of Primitive Gatherings. The wool appliqué is stitched by hand onto cotton background fabrics. The piecing together of the blocks and the quilting are done by machine.
As I worked on all aspects of this quilt, I thought of my Aunt Nellie. The wool appliqué – informal and free – and the garden theme led me to know the quilt had to be named for her.
She was known as Miss Nellie to most everyone in the community. I was lucky enough to know her as Aunt Nellie. She was a teacher, and so there are some people who knew her as Miss Hobby, too. She lived next door for my entire childhood, and serves to inspire me every day of my life.
She lived to the age of 91, and only in her 91st year was she unable to tend her garden. She grew vegetables to eat, to share, to can, and to freeze. She grew flowers for the joy of the bloom.
Aunt Nellie’s vegetable garden was neat and orderly, but her flowers were a riot of stems and leaves and blooms. Weeds were kept at bay in both places, but the separation she maintained in her butterbeans and squash was not valued in her flowerbeds. The snapdragons and pansies, the petunias and lilies and gladiolas all mingled about, with her snipping a cutting here and poking it in an empty spot there to take root and fill a space. And, take root they did. Her green thumb was legendary, possibly due in part by the load of fresh cow manure a local farmer delivered to her every spring.
She grew geraniums in pots, dahlias in a separate bed all their own. She had a bit of yard art, too. I remember a whimsical bird bath, tiers of porcelain basins given to her by a friend. Once it developed leaks, it was repurposed as a planter for succulents.
So the whimsical nature of some of these quilt blocks is a perfect tribute to a woman from the country. The label is a block I had made because Miss Jump, one of Linda Brannock’s creations, reminds me of Aunt Nellie.
More quilt details: The quilt finished at 60” x 75”. I used a whipstitch to secure the wool to the cotton, usually with perle cotton thread, but sometimes with embroidery floss or even fine sewing thread. The quilting is all hand-guided freemotion stitching on my home machine. I used Dream Cotton Request batting and a cotton fabric for the background. And it was all fun! Just as Aunt Nellie would have wanted it to be.
Oh, and another detail. Because the wool is so visually heavy, I made a wider binding than I usually do. The “standard” 1/4” binding seems so wimpy on a large wool quilt, so I cut the binding 3 1/2”, then folded in half and stitched it to the front of the quilt with a hearty 3/8” seam allowance (or scant 1/2”). The binding then finishes (with these fabrics) at 1/2”. I used a woven plaid (easy to stitch down by hand) and cut it on the bias.
More about Aunt Nellie: I’ve written a lot about Aunt Nellie already, if you type “Nellie” in the search box, you’ll find several references to her. But, she is the older of the two “Spinster Sisters” in this post, where I shared more details of her: https://sandygilreath.com/spinster-sisters/
