Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters Read Online Free Page A

completed eighty-four of the blocks and had already begun sewing them into rows.
    A year and a half after discovering Harriet’s quilt at the garage sale, Maggie completed her quilt top. During her next lunch hour, she layered and basted it on the Ping-Pong table in the Ocean View Hills recreation room. Many of the residents gathered around to admire her work while the Courtyard Quilters threadedneedles and helped her baste the top, batting, and backing together. Their enjoyment salvaged what had otherwise been an unpleasant day. At the morning staff meeting, the director informed them that their parent company had sold them off to an HMO, one with a reputation for slashing budgets and cutting staff. Maggie had an excellent record and the faith of her supervisors, but those accomplishments suddenly seemed inconsequential.
    When new management took over a few months later, Maggie kept her job, but ten of her coworkers, including her direct supervisor, were laid off. Maggie was shaken enough to consider canceling her long-anticipated vacation to Lowell, Massachusetts, to research Harriet Findley Birch’s life, but she had already purchased her airline tickets and people were expecting her. Postponing her trip might help prove her commitment to her job at a critical hour, but with Ocean View Hills in such disarray, the ideal time for a vacation might never come.
    “Go,” Mrs. Stonebridge commanded. “You’ve been wanting to do this for so long. You’ll regret it later if you cancel your plans.”
    “We won’t let them fire you while you’re gone,” promised Mrs. Blum. When the other quilters looked at her in exasperation, she quickly added, “Not that you’re in any danger. That’s just silly.”
    It didn’t seem silly to Maggie, but finally she realized she could not cancel a trip that had been so many months in the planning. In Massachusetts, she spent a week admiring the fall foliage, exploring the local quilt shops, and sharing Harriet’s quilt with the curator of the New England Quilt Museum. The curator in turn introduced Maggie to local historians and a professor who had extensively researched the history of the cotton mills. He was able to identify more than twenty of the cotton prints in Harriet’s quilt as fabrics made in the early nineteenth century by the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, and he promised to see what else he could find in his university’s extensive historical archives.
    The visit was over far too soon, but Maggie returned home determined to complete her own quilt. The Courtyard Quilters hadidentified many of the traditional patterns for her, but there were many others none of them had ever seen, nor could find in any quilt pattern reference book. Maggie invented names of her own, inspired by Harriet’s imagined life—Oregon Trail, Rocky Road to Salem, Mill Girls, Lowell Crossroads, Franklin’s Choice.
    On the same day Maggie finished sewing the binding on her quilt, the staff of Ocean View Hills were offered the opportunity to accept a ten percent pay cut or a pink slip. With great misgivings, Maggie chose the pay cut. She loved her job but wondered how much longer she would be able to keep it.
    She forgot her worries for a time on Saturday, when she displayed her completed quilt at the Goose Tracks Quilt Shop. Her new friends were there, as well as many other quilters who had heard through the grapevine that she might bring the finished quilt that day. They admired and praised her work, and took photos—not only of the quilt, but of Maggie posed beside the quilt, and of themselves with Maggie in front of the quilt. Several encouraged her to enter it in a quilt show, but Maggie thought of how far her quilting skills had come since she began the quilt and shuddered to think what a judge might say about her first blocks.
    After the group broke up, Lois, the quilt shop owner, came over for a closer look. “It’s lovely,” she said. “What are you going to call it?”
    “My