65th Birthday Quilt

Last August, as my 65^th birthday approached, I asked the members of my immediate family to each give me a half a yard of brightly colored 100% cotton fabric as a birthday gift. I explained that I would use the fabric to make myself a quilt. I have made quilts for others for new babies, graduations, and weddings; but I had never made a quilt for myself.

 The fabrics they gave me are exquisite and in many instances quite representative of those who selected them. My son who has a passion for anime gave me fabric covered in Totoros (a famous Hayao Miyazaki character) that he special ordered from Japan. My daughter-in-law the florist chose a fabric that features flowers. My grandson who adores anything that “goes” chose a print with cars and airplanes. My son the musician chose a woven fabric, which I feel represents the action of weaving his musical competitions from different strands of sound. His girlfriend is an artist who does a lot of printmaking and she gave me a fabric that’s a print. I also received bright purple fabric from my husband and bright orange from my daughter. From these raw materials provided, I pieced my personal story cloth of family, home, ancestry, land, and the fruition of a decades-long marriage to my husband, keeper of my heart.

The quilt contains my family’s gifted fabrics as well as fabrics I have used in the past to make quilts for lifecycle events, fabrics handed down to me by my mother and grandmother, and fabrics taken from clothes I wore when pregnant and during my years raising my children. The square representing my baby grandson is made from the fabrics I used to make his baby quilt. 

One square features a Hmong story cloth given to me as a farewell gift when I left a city job that I loved to move to my home in the country. The Hmong historically have no written language. They preserve the narratives of their lives and history through story cloths. The one included in my quilt depicts their grief when forced to leave their ancestral home and the plants, animals, and natural environment they cherished. I identify with this loss. It grieved me to leave my home in the forest where I raised my children when Ron and I accepted the limitations brought on by age and moved into town. It will always grieve me. 

The individual quilt squares represent my husband, my three children, my daughter-in-law, my youngest son’s girlfriend, my two grandsons, my matriarchal ancestors, and the home I left in the forest. One additional square represents future grandchildren I may have. The Hmong story cloth that resonates with me provides the final square to make one dozen. 

I pieced the quilt (top and bottom) and then I paid a quilter to stitch the quilting using a computer program on a long-arm sewing machine. The quilting pattern I chose is hands. You can see them more clearly on the back of the quilt than on the front. Finally, I sewed the binding by hand to complete the project. 

It has been nearly a year since I turned 65. My birthday gift was both the process of making my own story cloth and the finished product. When I wrap myself in my birthday quilt, I feel embraced by family, home, land, and personal history. It comforts me in these miserable times we are living through and helps me cling to hope for a better future. May love wrap us in its embrace and save us all.