‘He’ll love having that design in the quilt.’ Her sisters didn’t seem to understand why and Carrie certainly wouldn’t. ‘Ginny and Daisy were little but accepted we didn’t eat candy canes … ever,’ she added dramatically, hands up, fingers spread wide.
‘Why not?’ Carrie asked. ‘Not that I like them. I had one last year and it was like wiping a stick of sugar around myteeth.’
Fern smiled. ‘Grandad broke two teeth on a candy cane, and from that moment on he declared them “lethal” and that was that.’
‘It’s no big loss,’ said Daisy. ‘You’re right, Carrie. Theyarelike sucking on a big bit of sugar.’
‘Pretty on the fabric though,’ Ginny concluded, back to the task in hand. ‘What about sashing, Mum?’ Ginny wanted to know.
Loretta went and retrieved three morerolls of material from the cupboard in the hallway. ‘I brought these home from the shop, so it’s up to you, girls.’ There was a white fabric, a soft green, a vibrant red.
‘I might be able to answer if I actually knew what sashing was.’ Fern grimaced igniting a giggle from Carrie.
Ginny explained, ‘You have all your blocks, your pieces, in whatever designs we do, and the sashing will bring allthose parts of the quilt together and make it pop.’
‘Yeah, still no idea,’ Fern concluded.
Ginny grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and began to sketch it out, a rectangle and then squares across it and down. She pointed to the areas between the squares. ‘This will be what we call sashing. It kind of separates the blocks, I suppose, but also brings the whole thing together, does that makesense?’
Carrie said that it did. Fern merely shrugged. Whatever it was sounded good and she’d let her sister lead the way if she thought it was best.
Ginny pointed to the outer area of her sketch and then one closer to the blocks. ‘This is the outer border, then the inner border, and at the very outside, of course, we have the binding, which is the strip on the very edge.’ She picked up thewhite fabric and the berry red that Loretta had just shown them. ‘How about a strip of the snowy white and at the end of the strip a square of the red. The red will almost look like little quilted squares when the sashing is fixed on. Then I think a red backing for the quilt would be perfect, and it’s more forgiving than white.’
‘You really have thought about this,’ said Fern. She had wonderedwhether Daisy would be put out, given she was the one in the shop every day and doing this sort of thing more than either of her sisters, but she looked just as content as Fern with the way things were playing out. ‘May I ask why don’t we just sew all the squares together?’
‘That’s one way of doing it,’ said Loretta. ‘Would you rather do it that way, Fern?’
Fern clasped a hand against her chestand laughed. ‘Don’t ask me, I don’t want it ruined.’
Carrie dismissed the suggestion she get involved in the decision making. ‘Both ways sound good to me.’
‘I tell you what,’ said Loretta, ‘make the squares, lay them all out and then decide whether we want sashing or not.’
But Ginny was more decisive. ‘The pieces are going to be so different we’ll need sashing to bring it all together. Andthe snowy white will make the other fabrics shine.’
Fern wasn’t going to suggest differently and they pressed on.
Carrie looked at the collection of blocks they’d made so far, piled up on the table. ‘What happens when we have enough?’
‘Then we lay them out how we want them,’ said Ginny, ‘and after that we pin them all together and, using a sewing machine, fix them together properly. After thatwe add the batting, which is the layer of insulation between the fabrics, if you like, and it makes the quilt warm and heavy. We add the backing as the third layer, pin all three together, and then it’s back to the machine again.’
Daisy had finished working on a block of material covered in images of thimbles, balls of wool, a sewing machine and a mannequin. She picked it up along with a pieceof plain red material and lay them next to each other.
‘I hope I don’t mess any of this up,’ said Carrie. She seemed to waver between being a part of it and realising she was an outsider and panicking that she wasn’t doing things right.
Ginny stopped measuring the fabric she was going to use. ‘Grandad will love it all, I guarantee you. Quilting is about so much more than perfection.’ She reflectedon their quilts upstairs.
‘She’s right,’ said Fern. And she had an idea. She went upstairs and came back with her childhood quilt, she held it high in the air and from behind the material said, ‘Look at the denim square with lace.’ She waited a while and then when Carrie announced she’d found it, Fern leaned her head around the quilt and declared, ‘The most terrible example of needlework, I thinkyou’ll agree. I got so flustered with that square, insistent I fixed the lace on so there was no danger of it falling off – it came from one of my grandmother’s dresses – that I used way more stitches than it really needed. It shows, but Mum never fixed it up, because it didn’t need mending just because it wasn’t perfect.’ Fern gulped, thinking of her conversation with her mum after dinner, andwhen she looked at Loretta she realised her mum was thinking the same.
How had it taken Fern so long to see what was so obvious?
Ginny added, ‘If the quilt was perfectly stitched Fern might not remember how much that piece of lace meant to her. The way it is, still, has a strong memory attached at her determination to never let it fall apart.’
‘Relax,’ Daisy told Carrie. ‘Messing the quiltup is pretty much impossible.’ She picked up another container. ‘Don’t forget we have these stencils. There are some good shapes in here.’ She indicated that Carrie should go ahead and rummage. ‘You can add buttons, ribbon, whatever you can find. Although not too girlie, this is Ivor we’re talking about.’
Carrie pulled out a stencil of a gingerbread man. ‘Does he like gingerbread?’ she asked.
Ginny gave a whoop of joy and grabbed a piece of shiny bronzed fabric. ‘Use this, and he loves gingerbread men. In fact –’ she nudged Carrie ‘– Fern was once the gingerbread queen. All of us, especially Grandad, devoured her gingerbread.’
