Mother Lucia’s Last Pair of Scissors

I was almost 10 years old when my mom decided that I was ready for a significant honor.

Like many of the milestones that gradually separate us as adults from the carefree days of childhood, that particular moment remains clear in my mind.

My mom and I were standing in the little bedroom I shared with my baby sister. Dolls still shared space with my Nancy Drew novels on the bookshelf, and our candy-pink curtain fluttered in the breeze of a dusty Arizona evening.

Together we carefully folded the aging white comforter with its sprigs of candy pink flowers into a puffy square.

We remade the bed with clean sheets, and then – the honor.

Being Entrusted with a Family Heirloom

That box store comforter was replaced with a real quilt. A handmade, heirloom quilt.

“Now you have to be careful with this,” my mom warned me as we smoothed it flat. “There will never be another one of these.” In awe of this beautiful treasure (and quite possibly a little impressed with my own importance) I nodded solemnly and vowed to follow all the rules.

• No laying on the quilt, always cover it with another blanket first
• Always fold the sheet over the top of the quilt at night so I wouldn’t stain the top edge
• Don’t pull or tug on it
• Don’t pick at stray threads
• Don’t put anything dirty on the quilt, ever!

The quilt was a treasure. It had a high place of worth in our family, and it was an unheard of honor for me to be allowed to use it every single day and night.

A Simple Sunbonnet Sue

By my standards today, that heirloom quilt was really a very modest affair. Worn squares of inexpensive white muslin formed the backdrop for simple, traditional Sunbonnet Sue girls. There they stood in their tidy rows, with their different colored bonnets peeking out over sweet little pinafores.

Some of the fabric was already faded and some of the stitches on the Sunbonnet Girls were starting to pop.

But no matter. It was priceless to us all.

A Living Piece of Family History

The reason why that specific quilt was – and is – so precious to my whole family is that the Sunbonnet Sue squares were handmade by my great-grandmother. Like many kids, I never got to meet my dad’s grandmother, since Mother Lucia passed away several years before my parents even met.

But Mother Lucia was such a force in the family I often felt as though she was closer to me in some ways than my living grandparents.

Picture a prim and proper Texan lady who’d raised her 10 children through the Great Depression. A woman who wore skirts to town, a bonnet in the sun, and was in the hospital having her last child at the same time her oldest daughter was also in labor.

For many decades Mother Lucia was the very heart of her whole family.

She was a true lady in the best traditions of the Old West, a pioneer and survivor who was loved by everyone who ever met her for her kind heart and generous spirit.

Mother Lucia, Sunbonnet Sues, & Scissors

Much of what Mother Lucia did with her life was purely practical. She could plow a field with a team of mules, raise poultry, cook, garden, and sew. And she did allow herself one artistic passion.

Quilting.

Mother Lucia didn’t quilt the way you see in the local quilting circle. Her quilts were often salvage and bargain fabrics, hand-sewn in her spare time with love and kindness – and you can still see it in the painstaking hand stitches on the brim of every sunbonnet.

Her quilts were simple, and the fabrics wore thin, but her magic was in every finished quilt.

Although she probably didn’t realize it when she first started to cut out the shapes of Sunbonnet Sues’ from green and pink tiny-polka dot muslin, they would be her last quilting project.

The long and often hard years had finally caught up to her.

As she pieced the squares her eyesight was failing her, and her hands – long used to the hard labor of churning butter and washing clothes by hand – were becoming twisted with rheumatism. She bravely soldiered on, determined at least to finish those twelve squares with their Sunbonnet Girls.

Finally, the last stitch was set in the last brim.

The Last Time Mother Lucia Used Her Scissors

Like any quilting project’s last step, Mother Lucia reached trembling hands for her pair of scissors (almost certainly the same quality Fiskars brand that seamstresses have used for generations), and gently snipped the last thread.

And she was done.

She didn’t have the strength or health left to finish the quilt – just sewing the squares was a Herculean effort.

So she set them aside, hoping that some future daughter or granddaughter would want to finish what she hadn’t been able to.

The Legacy of True He/Art

Which is how it came to be that, almost two decades later, my mom discovered a pile of shabby, faded Sunbonnet Sue squares collecting dust in an overstuffed cupboard in my Grandma’s house.

As one of the few women who cared about quilting in her generation, my Grandma – Mother Lucia’s daughter-in-law – had ended up with the squares, but her own interest in quilting had waned long before she got around to finishing the quilt.

Some of my earliest memories of home involve my mom’s sewing corner.

No matter where we lived, including an 800 square foot bunkhouse that was my first home, she always had her sewing machine permanently set up. Along with an ironing table, and a lidless container that held essentials like chalk and a pair of scissors with orange handles.

Many years before I was given the honor of being allowed to use the Sunbonnet Sue quilt, I can remember my mother taking a break from the mending work she always did on her sewing machine to turn those slightly moth-eaten squares into a proper quilt.

I can see her carefully finding cloth to match the antiqued fabrics Mother Lucia used in the squares to sash the quilt together.

And I can just remember in the misty halls of childhood watching as she carefully tied the quilt with yarn. These days we never tie our quilts, but at the time it was one of the first quilting projects my mom had taken on in years, and she didn’t want to risk destroying the fragile squares with a bad sewing job.

So the green and pink yarn came up through the back of the quilt to the front, were tied off, and the ends were neatly snipped with the Fiskars scissors my mom has always used.

My Quilt is the Only Tangible Link I Have to Mother Lucia

Mother Lucia was a woman who lived through incredible times. She saw the horse and carriage give way to the automobile, she lived through two world wars, and more change and hardship than many of us can even imagine.

In short, she wasn’t materialistic.

What few things she managed to keep through the hard years were simple, heirlooms only because of their age and their sentimental qualities. Everyone who was privileged to know her treasured something about her. Whether it was her unfailing strength in the hard years, or the love she wrapped everyone in when they came through her door – Mother Lucia was a treasure.

If her doubtlessly battered sewing kit even survived her, it’s being passed down by a distant cousin now.

I don’t even have any pictures of Mother Lucia for myself.

That super-simple, inexpensive Sunbonnet Sue is the only tangible, physical link I have with the woman who shaped the destiny of generations – and who, in a rather roundabout way – shaped my own future.

How Mother Lucia’s Last Pair of Scissors was the First Step in Our Quilting Journey

No one could have predicted that, out of all the women who claimed some level of kinship with Mother Lucia, the quilting bug would bite my mom.

Once she was done with the legacy quilt, my mom first felt a little sorry that my brother and sister didn’t have anything like that of their own. So she made twin quilts for them as well, a Suspender Sam for my brother and a more modern and colorful Sunbonnet Sue for my sister.

Theirs were more creative, incorporating newer fabrics, pretty buttons and appliques – entire quilted scenes, actually.

After that my mom started on a Double Wedding Ring quilt, and then she taught me the basics of sewing and quilting with a denim crazy quilt. And from there it just kept snowballing.

Continuing the Legacy of Scissors & Art

Somehow, more than fifty years after Mother Lucia snipped the last threads on her last quilting project – we have our own quilting business!

Our own creations tend to be a little more elaborate than the traditional Sunbonnet Sue that started us on this long journey. Together my mom and I craft artistic masterpieces out of printed photo panels, appliqued silk leaves and flowers, layer texture and 3D elements together with foam, buttons, beads, and ribbons.

But we also restore antique quilts that we find.

So many of those treasures are lost in antique stores and garage sales – pieces just like those precious Sunbonnet Sue squares that my one-of-a-kind Mother Lucia sewed by hand on the West Texas Plains.

When Will the Last Snip Be Made?

Sometimes I wonder if Mother Lucia knew for sure that it would be the last time for her when she cut the last thread on the last Sunbonnet Sue square. Maybe – she was a practical woman, after all. But I seriously doubt that she had any idea that her love of quilting would continue on past her lifetime, taking root in a woman she never met, in a great-granddaughter she would never know.

One day my Mom’s eyes will fail her, or her hands simply will refuse to close around a scissor. And it’ll be her turn to cut the last thread on some final project.

And one day after that it’ll be my turn.

The quilts we’ve sewn, the projects we’ve known, the love and laughter, hope and joy that have been sewn into each seam with such loving care will pass on into other hands.

They may end up in a garage sale. Or, like my treasured Sunbonnet Sue, they may end up carefully folded away in storage so that they’ll last as long as possible (alongside the photo album with my pictures of the quilt.)

But one thing is certain.

The love of the craft will endure. The tools of the trade that withstand the test of time will be taken up, whether it’s a slightly battered sewing machine or the most reliable brand of scissors. And somewhere, sometime, outside of our reach or knowledge the love and happiness that quilting creates will take hold in someone else.