”
What you are is God’s gift to you; what you make of yourself is
your gift to God.
”
~ (George Washington Carver)
“What you are is God’s gift to you; what you make of yourself is your gift to God.” ~ (George Washington Carver)
Gilroyan Annabel Sawyer Kropff has a very vivid memory: “I remember where I was sitting the first time I had to write the year ‘1920;’ all my life the date had been in the teens and then suddenly it became ‘1920;’ it was a strange feeling.”
She grew up in Hereford, Texas, in the Panhandle, as they call it, and graduated from high school in 1927. She began quilting at the age of 10, using leftover scraps of cloth. She points to a beautiful square in the mint-bordered quilt hanging in her home.
“That material is from a dress I made for my husband’s mother,” she tells me. “Scraps were only seven and a half cents a yard. Good cloth was 10 cents a yard; this was during Depression time, you know.”
The block patterns were printed in the Dallas Morning News in the 1930s and ’40s. Annabel would cut them out, blow them up and then recreate each pattern in cloth using the newspaper design as her guide.
The 35 panels in the quilt she is showing me are made of a hundred different patterns, colors and designs – different memories and different stories all woven together.
After her husband died, Annabel turned more to quilting as something that was truly her own craft. Quilting was both therapeutic and a social outlet, and she was a charter member of the Quilter’s Association. One of her blocks hangs in the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, America’s First Quilt Museum.
The secrets to Annabel’s longevity include her strong faith, her closeness to her five children, and her curiosity about anything and everything under the sun. She is always reading something new, although not necessarily what you’d imagine a 93-year-old woman would be reading. Her current book of choice is called “Bad Girls from the Bible,” by Liz Curtis Higgs, and features such clever chapter headings as, “Potiphar’s Wife, Bored to Distraction,” “The Woman at the Well, Dying for a Drink,” and “Delilah, The First Cut is the Deepest.”
“Know your limits, not so that you can honor them, but so that you can smash them to pieces and reach for magnificence.” ~ (Cherie Carter-Scott)
When Annabel broke her arm in a bad fall, the doctor put it in a cast that went all the way down her arm and encased part of her right hand.
It seemed her quilting days might be over. At first all she could do was wiggle two fingers, but she couldn’t move her thumb. There would be no quilting with the loss of the use of her thumb. She couldn’t put two fingers together, but she found she could run a sewing machine with her left hand. Little by little, she began to get movement back as she worked on the squares for her next quilt.
It was very painful, but she knew that with arthritis and her badly damaged arm and hand, the only cure was to keep moving: “Use it or lose it,” was her philosophy, no matter how much her thumb, first finger, and arm hurt at night. She never gave up; in fact, she came up with a plan.
She set up the quilting frame on the kitchen table with C clamps and sorted through all the fabric she had saved over the years. The movement required to work scissors was very therapeutic and began to strengthen her hand. She worked for just over one year, but when she was done, she had created a quilt for each one of her beloved great grandchildren – 21 beautiful quilts in all.
In her entryway hangs a beautiful photo of Melinda, Lindsey, Leah, Blake, Veronica, Annie, Thomas, Timothy, Amy, Royce, Matthew Pascal, Martin, Joseph, Christopher (who appears on CBS’ “Joan of Arcadia”), Michael, Ryan, Sean, Christian, Kevin, Amanda, and Matthew Scott–each great grandchild with his or her quilt. In the process of making the quilts, her hand had healed, movement returned to her thumb, and her hand was once again flexible and limber.
There are crazy quilt patterns, the circular pattern of a “trip around the world” quilt, and one that looks like a pinwheel when finished. To make that pattern, she folded newspaper into fourths and pinned it onto the fabric. “You sew through the paper,” she explains to me, “And then when you’re done, you cut the paper away.” Now she’s making lap robes, or “cuddle blankets,” for her 13 grandchildren.
We all need to know that we’re a necessary link in a never-ending chain. It’s the family roots that feed us, the family circles that lead us on, and on, like the links in Annabel’s quilt patterns.
