Cotton Country Quilts

04/06/2026

It’s always good to win Bobbin Chicken, but it is a bonus day to win Spool Chicken! Yes, I have another spool. 🩵🧵🪡✂️🩵

03/03/2026

Be a part of the fun! Come volunteer at the Ogallala Quilt Festival this year! Contact Tammy Tucker to sign up. Phone and email are on the catalog cover.

02/05/2026

What's on your sewing table today? I have a quilt for the Ogallala Quilter's Society Quilt Festival and a commission quilt on my table right now. Pictures later when I have enough blocks to make sense of the quilts. Show me your quilts in process!

02/03/2026

02/02/2026

I’m dealing with a pressing situation today.

01/24/2026

What re you doing during the current snow event? I’m cutting out fabric for a new client quilt.

12/06/2025

My great-grandmother was a Potter. Now will research to see if this Potter family is part of my GG family.

The Thanksgiving the Baby Was Born in the Church, 1893
Cranberry, North Carolina, November 23, 1893
The preacher had just finished the Thanksgiving sermon when sixteen-year-old newlywed Lillie Potter doubled over in the third pew. Her water broke right there on the pine floor, three weeks early and faster than anyone expected.
The women cleared the men out, turned the altar into a birthing bed with quilts and the preacher’s own coat for a pillow, and sent the fastest boy running for Granny Wise, the midwife who lived two miles up the creek.
Granny never made it. The baby crowned before the boy was out of sight.
Lillie’s mama and three neighbor women took over. The only light was the coal-oil lamps and whatever sun came through the frosted windows. The only hot water was what they boiled in the church’s communion kettle.
While Lillie pushed, the men stood outside in the cold, hats in hand, praying loud enough to rattle the steeple. The preacher paced the porch quoting every Bible verse he knew about babies and deliverance.
At 2:17 p.m. a girl’s first cry rang out inside the little log church, clear and strong as a church bell. The men outside let out a cheer that scattered crows for half a mile.
They named her Grace Mercy Cranberry Church Potter (Grace for the day, Mercy for the safe passage, and the rest because that’s exactly where she decided to be born).
The women cleaned mother and child with the same basin they used for baptisms, wrapped the baby in the altar cloth, and carried her out to show the waiting fathers.
Preacher lifted her high and declared, “This child is already baptized in the Lord’s house. Reckon we’ll dedicate her proper next Sunday.”
They ate Thanksgiving supper on the church grounds that evening (turkey, dressing, and seventeen kinds of pie) while baby Grace slept in the same cradle that had held half the babies in the county for christening.
Every year after, on the fourth Thursday of November, the Cranberry Church bell rang exactly at 2:17 p.m. (no matter who was preaching) just to remind the mountains that once, in that very sanctuary, a Thanksgiving baby decided the world could wait a few more minutes, but love could not.
Grace grew up, married, married a preacher’s son, and when she died in 1981 at eighty-eight, they buried her in the churchyard under a stone that reads:
Born in the House of the Lord
Thanksgiving Day 1893
Returned Home the Same Way

11/26/2025

Do you love these quilts as much as I do? Which one is your favorite?

11/22/2025

I enjoy reading different quilt history stories. I hope you enjoy this story.

In the spring of 1933, Muddy Branch Hollow sagged under a rain that never seemed to quit. Clothes wouldn’t dry, roofs leaked like sieves, and the creek spilled over its banks until the road vanished beneath brown water. Families patched their cabins with feed sacks and coal tar, but the storm kept chewing at the edges of the hollow.

One morning, as thunder rolled like empty coal cars, fourteen-year-old Ora Mae Jarrell stitched scraps of old shirts together on her porch. Reds faded to rust, blues washed to gray, denim frayed like tired rope. She wasn’t sewing for beauty—just trying to keep her hands busy so she wouldn’t cry.

Her little brother asked what she was making.

“Haven’t decided,” she said. “But it oughta mean something.”

By the end of the day, she had sewn a patchwork square big enough to cover her porch window. Neighbors passing by stopped to look at it—bright scraps glowing even under the weeping sky.

The next day, a woman brought an old flour sack dyed with berries. Another brought a strip of her husband’s worn-out overalls. Someone offered a piece of a baby blanket that had survived three generations.

Day after day, families added pieces—stitched by hand, knotted with twine, patched with hope. Soon the square became a banner, then a sheet, then something larger than anyone expected.

They called it The Patchwork Flag.

When the rain rose high enough to swallow porches, the men of the hollow strung the flag between two chestnut posts on the dry ridge above town. It flapped wildly in the wind, a riot of colors against a world washed dull.

To the people of Muddy Branch, the flag meant more than cloth. It meant:
We are still here. We are many pieces, but we are one thing.

When government relief men rode in weeks later, searching for which hollows were still reachable, they spotted the flag long before they saw the cabins. The storm had taken the road, the bridge, and half the gardens—but it hadn’t taken the hollow.

And when the relief wagons finally rolled into Muddy Branch, people swore the flag was still waving, even though the wind had gone still.

Ora Mae kept a square from that flag all her life.

Because sometimes, the smallest scraps hold the biggest stories.

11/04/2025

In 1934, women in Appalachian communities gathered to create quilts from scraps of fabric, old clothing, and donated textiles. These quilts provided warmth, comfort, and a sense of home for families struggling to survive the harsh winters of the Depression.

These women were mothers, grandmothers, and neighbors who understood that warmth could save lives and preserve dignity. One recalled, “Every stitch we sewed carried care, hope, and a little warmth into a family’s life.”

Children assisted by sorting fabrics, holding needles, or learning simple stitches. Quilting gatherings became places of education, mutual support, and storytelling, where wisdom and encouragement were shared alongside practical skill.

By 1935, dozens of families relied on these quilts for survival. Though rarely mentioned in newspapers, the women’s labor preserved life, community bonds, and cultural heritage, demonstrating that courage could be expressed through patience, skill, and care.

11/03/2025