Chapter 4
Breakfast and show-and-tell, reluctant to say goodbye. Soon Julia would be returning to Southern California, Grace to San
Francisco, Vinnie to Cincinnati, Megan to Dayton, and Donna to Silver Pines, Minnesota, a small town about an hour north of
the Twin Cities. Their only consolation was their promise to one another that they would reunite the following year. In the
meantime, they would stay close through regular phone calls, letters, and emails.
But Donna’s smile suddenly turned crestfallen. “People always say they’ll keep in touch, but they usually don’t.”
“We’ll be different,” Vinnie declared.
Julia wanted to believe them both, but experience had taught her skepticism. They might leave Elm Creek Manor with the best
of intentions, but as the weeks passed and they fell into the patterns of ordinary life, they might forget how special their
week together had been. If they failed to nurture their friendship, it might become nothing more than a fond memory, something
to reflect upon and cherish when leafing through an old scrapbook rather than something vibrant and alive.
“We need a symbol, something to remind us of our promise,” Donna mused aloud.
“I know,” Vinnie exclaimed. “Let’s make a challenge quilt.”
“A what?” Julia asked. As far as she was concerned, every quilt was a challenge.
“A challenge quilt,” Vinnie repeated emphatically. “We’ll take a piece of fabric and divide it into equal shares. We’ll each
piece a block of our choice from it, and next year, we’ll meet at camp and sew our blocks together to make a sampler.”
“The challenge comes from being required to use a particular fabric rather than being free to choose whatever you like,” Grace
explained for Julia’s sake. “But sometimes there are other restrictions. Should we have any?”
“How about this?” said Megan. “We can’t begin our block until we take steps to solve our problems back home. That will keep
us from procrastinating.”
In the months that followed, the challenge quilt spurred them to persevere even when confronting their personal issues proved
easier said than done. When they reunited at quilt camp the following August, they were so pleased with their first challenge
quilt that they promptly began another, but without the requirement that they resolve major life crises before beginning their
blocks. The next year, Vinnie and Donna proposed making an elaborate Twelve Days of Christmas appliqué quilt, but Julia and
Megan balked, so they decided to make a holiday-themed row round robin instead, using red, green, gold, and white fabrics
and a variety of star patterns and other blocks suited to the festive season. For this style of quilt, which Julia particularly
enjoyed, one quilter began by sewing a row of blocks of her choice, which she then passed along to the next quilter. The second
quilter would add a row and pass it along, and so on, until every quilter in the group had added as many rows as they needed
to make a finished top.
By this time, the Cross-Country Quilters had discovered that sharing custody of the finished pieces was rather complicated, so the following year, they switched to creating their own interpretations of the same pattern rather than working together on a single quilt.
Currently they were working on their most challenging project by far, reproductions of an exquisite antique sampler called Harriet’s Journey.
The story behind the quilt was as fascinating as the quilt itself was beautiful.
In 1987, future Elm Creek Quilter Maggie Flynn was walking home from the bus stop after work when she passed a garage sale
and discovered a sampler quilt being used as a tablecloth for a glassware display. Although she was no expert, one look told
her that this quilt, despite its dusty, disheveled appearance, was a remarkable find. The homeowner was astonished by Maggie’s
interest in the bedraggled old sampler, which she had kept in her garage since moving to the neighborhood twenty-six years
before. Her mother-in-law had bought it at an estate auction, and when she tired of it, she had given it to her son to keep
dog hair off the car seats when he took his German shepherds to the park.
“We were just using it to hide an ugly table,” the homeowner said, bemused. “If you’re sure you want it, I guess I’ll take
five bucks for it.”
Maggie gladly paid.
She took the quilt home, where she examined it carefully and discovered that despite the years of ill treatment, the sampler
of one hundred unique blocks was free of holes, tears, and stains. More than that, the quilt was unquestionably a masterpiece,
completed in 1854 by a woman named Harriet Findley Birch, or so several lines of embroidery on the back revealed.
With the help of the Courtyard Quilters, a quilting bee at the Sacramento retirement home where Maggie worked, she relearned her long-forgotten sewing skills and made a replica of the fragile antique.
Fellow customers of her favorite local quilt shop admired her sampler so much that the proprietor invited her to teach a class so they could make their own versions.
The success of that class led to several more, which soon brought Maggie to the attention of local guilds, who invited her to lecture and teach at their monthly meetings, shows, and retreats.
Her students’ questions about the identity of Harriet Findley Birch and Maggie’s own enduring curiosity inspired her to find
answers. She delved into research that took her from the De Young Museum in San Francisco—where she consulted with none other
than future Cross-Country Quilter Grace Daniels, in a bit of serendipity that astonished them both when they reunited at Elm
Creek Manor years later—to the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts. Eventually Maggie discovered that Harriet
had worked as a mill girl in Lowell in the 1840s. Later, as a newlywed bride, she had traveled west with her husband along
the Oregon Trail, eventually settling in Salem, Oregon. Maggie theorized that Harriet had collected quilt patterns from friends
and family before setting out on the journey west. Perhaps the sampler was intended as a sort of quilt block library she could
draw upon throughout her life as a wife, mother, and homesteader.
As Maggie’s fame in the quilting world had spread, she had written a pattern book, My Journey with Harriet, which quickly sold out of its first edition and went into its third printing within a month. The success of her book and
her outstanding reputation as an instructor eventually led to a faculty position at Elm Creek Quilt Camp, where she taught
beginning hand-piecing and quilting classes and led workshops dedicated to mastering Harriet’s Journey.
At the Cross-Country Quilters’ most recent annual quilt camp reunion, Donna and Megan had taken Maggie’s Harriet’s Journey workshop.
Julia hadn’t enrolled because she found the project too daunting, Grace because she preferred more improvisational styles, and Vinnie because she had become thoroughly enamored with jelly roll quilts, quilts made from bundles of two-and-a-half-inch-wide strips of coordinating fabric.
She had packed her schedule with jelly roll design and sewing classes as well as something called “jelly roll race training,” the concept of which still bewildered Julia despite Vinnie’s frequent, animated descriptions.
But even Vinnie had been willing to set her new obsession aside for Harriet’s Journey when Donna suggested it as their new
group project. “I don’t know if I’m up to it,” Julia had demurred, studying the photo on the cover of Maggie’s copy of My Journey with Harriet with trepidation.
“Of course you are,” Vinnie had protested. “You’re perfectly capable of anything if you put your mind to it.”
“You’re not a novice quilter anymore,” Grace had reminded her. “Don’t let the sampler’s complexity intimidate you. It might
not be obvious at first glance, but you already know all the techniques required to make each of these blocks.”
“It can be daunting when you take in the whole quilt at once,” Donna had added, sympathetic. “But try not to think of it that
way. Break it down into its parts, and just enjoy making one block at a time without worrying about the rest.”
“And whenever you need help, all you have to do is ask,” Megan had assured her. “We’re here for you.”
Heartened by their confidence, Julia had agreed to the plan, and she had taken great pleasure in shopping for an assortment
of rich earth-tone fabrics with sky blue and peach as bright accent hues. After further discussion, the friends decided to
work on one block a week, with the new block announcement falling on Monday and the deadline to finish on Sunday. Every Thursday
evening they would have a conference call to note their progress, share tips, and offer encouragement. Emails were welcome
anytime. At that rate they would need more than two years to complete all one hundred blocks, and perhaps several weeks more
to sew the blocks together with sashing strips and borders, and more time yet to quilt and bind the top. But the leisurely
pace would allow them time to work on other projects too, without turning the weekly block assignments into a burden.