Quilters keep old-time techniques alive

By DIANA REESE
Special to The Star

Every Wednesday with needles and thimbles they gather — up to a dozen women and one man — around a quilt frame in the basement of Guardian Angels Catholic Church in Westport.

Together they sew and socialize as they keep an old art form alive.

This month, the Quilters of Guardian Angels tackled perhaps their toughest project ever: Quilting an 80-year-old quilt top made up of hundreds of tiny pieces, many of them just one-inch square, in an old pattern known as “Court House Steps.”

“We’ll have a beautiful piece of art when we’re through,” said Mary Reutter, who helped start the quilting group in 1982. “But it’s a new experience because the squares are so small. We’re always hitting seams.”

Bob Kazmierski, a retired business owner in Leawood, found the quilt top in the house of Margaret Gruber, his aunt, after she died in 1995 in Pittsburg, Kan.

He asked around, looking for someone to do the quilting, and was referred to the Quilters, who donate the proceeds from their work to the church.

To understand what they do, it helps to understand the multi-step process of creating a quilt.

“My husband says we’re crazy,” said Mary K. Marx. “We buy fabric so we can cut it into pieces, rearrange it and then sew it back together.”

In the past, though, making quilts was an exercise in recycling. Scraps from worn-out clothes, along with feed sacks (once made of bright cotton prints), were used.

“They didn’t waste anything,” Marx said.

Creating the quilt top is only half the process. Next, the pieced top, batting and backing material form a “sandwich” that’s stitched together. This stitching, known as quilting, can be done on machine or by hand, and in patterns or straight lines. A binding around the edges completes the quilt.

Reutter estimates it will take close to three months to finish the Court House Steps quilt, which measures 78 by 95 inches.

The quilting group got its start when Reutter decided (53 quilts ago) that she would make a quilt for each of her nine children. But after finishing the first two quilt tops, “I didn’t want them machine quilted,” she said, and put an ad in the Guardian Angels bulletin seeking quilters.

Five women responded, and the group began. They taught Reutter how to quilt, and she has passed on that knowledge.

In fact, she has recruited novice quilters with an almost evangelical zeal. About half of the current members learned their skills from Reutter, and she would love to find more.

Not all the members belong to Guardian Angels Parish — and not all are female, either.

“I got shanghaied,” says Ian Radford, a disabled veteran retired from the U.S. Marines.

“After morning Mass, they asked if I wanted to see a quilt, then would I like to hold a needle, then would I like to try to take a stitch.…” he said with a smile.

The group has 13 members now, but had 21 at its peak. Four of the five original women who responded to Mary’s ad have died.

Mertie Gramlich, who joined the group in 2000, learned to quilt as a child during the Depression. She recalled begging her mother, “Can I quilt?”

Raising a family and working as a nurse kept Gramlich from quilting until 1985. Since then, she‘s completed around 50 quilts. “Every stitch is by hand,” she said.

“This is the art,” said Mary Stanton about hand quilting. “This is the old way.”