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“Grandma Nettie's Quilt ”
Nettie Soles
Contributed by Laura Yost-Grande
Grandma Nettie Soles was my great-grandmother and lived in Whiteville, NC. She made all of her clothes and those of her four daughters including aprons, bonnets, and yes, underwear. This quilt of Grandma Nettie’s was made in the mid to late 1940’s out of scraps from these clothes as well as scraps from feedsacks. Grandma would stitch her quilts together and then she and her “quilting bee” would get together and quilt them. Grandma would hang the quilting frame from her living room ceiling with four chains. The ladies would sit around, quilt, and talk about the news of the day.
My mother, who was a young girl at the time, remembers Grandma Nettie and her “quilting bee.” Mom would hang out under the quilt frame, listening to the “news of the day” and play with her dolls. When she learned to sew, she made her doll clothes and then her own clothes, often from feedsacks. She would sometimes ask her father, a farmer, to pick up a feedsack with a certain pattern to make a particular skirt or blouse.
Farmers have been using cloth bags for grain, seed and feed ever since cloth was available. Making clothes out of these bags may seem unseemly today but during the great depression, there were great shortages of money and during World War II, shortages of cloth. Feedsacks filled the needs of thousands of women for fabric to create the things they could not otherwise buy. Today, my mother can still recognize which patches on the quilt came from a feedsack or clothes she wore. The stories of my Grandma Nettie’s quilts connect me to a woman I greatly admire but hardly knew.
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