By Mary Ellen Wynes, a HomeWorks Tri-County Cooperative member
A single mom and career woman years before it was common, my grandma never had time for hobbies. She retired in 1957 at age 70 and filled some suddenly empty hours cutting hundreds of small fabric circles to make a yo-yo quilt, a popular project with crafters that year.
Struck with the enormity of the task of basting the edge of each circle, then pulling the thread to gather it into a still smaller “yo-yo,” she soon elicited the assistance of everyone in the family. No one escaped! Shortly after being seated for a visit, guests were handed a piece with a prethreaded needle and instructed to “make a yo-yo.” When we needed “chips” for a poker game during a family vacation, she produced a wrinkled paper bag full of yo-yos, which worked well.
Years flew by, and the yo-yos were forgotten until my grandma passed at 99. When my mom discovered the battered bags, their contents as brightly vibrant as ever, they were no longer hundreds of individual circles, but they had been meticulously stitched together into diamond shapes. They were given to me with the request, “Do something with Grandma’s yo-yos.”
Guided more by nostalgia than skill, I pieced that fabric of my life together into a quilt, remembering as I stitched, the lives of others who were a part of its creation. The last Christmas before my mother’s death, my parents’ departure from our home after a visit was delayed by car trouble. Given this unexpected bonus day together, I asked if she would teach me how to embroider so that I could put the finishing touch on Grandma’s quilt. Together we completed the project by stitching on the border: “Created by Ruby B. MacLean 1952 and Mary Ellen Wynes 1993.”
