A warm place to meet..........

It was wonderful to hold regular meetings in a warm place. That seed that blossomed in the late 1990's had come to "full bloom" in the Millennium year of 2000! We enjoyed gathering to share fabrics, stitch our blocks, enjoy a potluck, stories of our families, all those things that enrich our lives. We got so much stitching done and had so much to share that it wasn't long before we were talking of hosting an exhibit.
In March of 2001, we presented our work in an exhibit that honored Women's History Month. As the years went by we continued to stitch and shared things for other exhibits of Sunbonnet Sue quilts and Aprons and Hats and Basket Quilts, always in honor of Women's History Month.

And now we are here again........it's Women's History Month and we are back with an exhibit of Crazy Quilting. This one is different. Instead of just one month, this time it's over six months that this exhibit will be in place. Each month (except July) there will be special activities going on at the museum so that others can learn the art of crazy quilting. As we journey through those months, I'll take you along. The opening of the exhibit is Saturday, March 7th and when I return from it I will sit down in the evening and share some photos and stories of the exhibit with all of you. I won't do it all in one night, though. I'll share it a little at a time. I'm also going to introduce you to the women in our group and the projects they have made or are working on. I'll tell you more about The Landing, the Scott County Historical Society and it's home, the Stans Museum. So if you enjoy crazy quilting, any type of handwork, a little bit of history and you love a good story, then come along on this little Crazy Quilting Journey with me!
Most Sincerely Yours,
Miss Martha

Crazy Quilting 2000

January of 2000 arrived and we all survived Y2K and life returned to normal. After Judith had suggested that we meet at the Historical Society, plans were set in motion to do a program on crazy quilting and share our interest. On a cold winter day, Saturday, January 15th, I presented a program on crazy quilting and 17 people braved the cold!! There was so much enthusiasm that we set a date for our next meeting and on January 27th we officially became "The Scott County Crazy Quilters". We found a home at the Scott County Historical Society. (To learn more about SCHS go here. )

Coming soon.........it's finally here so read this first!

The "seeds" for our little crazy quilting group were "planted" during the summers in the late 1990's when I volunteered and then worked as a site interpreter at Historic Murphy's Landing. Now known as The Landing, it is a lovely place where old homes from the surrounding area have been relocated and interpreters tell the story of the settling of the area along the Minnesota River Valley (1850's to 1890's - if you click here you can check it out). It was a lovely place to work. One could almost not call it "work"! It was a very peaceful place. I took the name of Martha which was my great grandmother's name. A few years earlier, I had learned that she had been a dressmaker and that was the "role" I usually took at Murphy's. The home I was most often assigned to was the Harms house, set in about 1860. There was an old treadle sewing machine, a loom and other accoutrement's of a seamstress in the house. One of my favorite things was when a group of young home-schooled girls would come to the Landing for a "learning day". I loved it when they would stop by "my house" and they love it because I had a sewing basket filled with scraps that they could use to sew dolls and such. We called our little group "Miss Martha's Sewing Circle". In my journal from 1999, date August 6th I wrote "Sewing Circle....meet girls 1:00 p.m.......We had a lovely time stitching on crazy quilt blocks and eating the English toffee I brought. It was really good." Just a few weeks before that I had accompanied my husband on a business trip to England so we were eating the goodies from that trip plus I shared laces I had bought in Nottingham.

In the summer of 1998, I proposed a plan to have volunteers and anyone who was interested in crazy quilting to make a 12" block for a crazy quilt that would be a raffle item at Murphy's Landing's Annual Adopt-a-House event. We had a lot of fun creating those blocks and the completed quilt raised a little over $2500 for The Landing. Definitely a success!

That next summer of 1999, we began work on another raffle quilt (embroidered and patchwork blocks) but still enjoyed working on crazy quilts, too. I had sewn the raffle quilt together and when it was finished, I really hated to part with it and so was determined to make one of my own. I remember telling Doc Pistulka (another volunteer who was a Doctor in real life but enjoyed playing the role of the village doctor at Murphy's Landing) that I thought a good name for our sewing circle would be "The Ladies of the Landing Philanthropic Sewing Society". He laughed as he should have as no one would want to say that more than once and so that idea never grew. Then one day after some of us came in from a day of "work" in the houses, we were talking about how nice it would be if we could continue to meet all year round and continue to crazy quilt. Minnesota winters are no fun in a house or building with no heat or just a small log stove!! Judith, the Education coordinator at the Scott County Historical Society, was at the Landing that day and heard us talking and said "why not meet at the Historical Society?" And so we did! The seed had blossomed for what would become our crazy quilt group.