Batting Brigade: Not your mother’s quilt guild

By Chelsea Retherford | Living 50 Plus
Linda Sherrod, 78, has sewn and quilted almost her entire life. It was something she said she picked up from her mother, who likely sewed more out of necessity than for fun, because not so long ago, quilting and sewing your own clothes and bedding was a way of life in the rural South.
“My mother was the oldest of five girls, and my grandmother taught all of them to sew in quilts,” Sherrod said. “They would make a quilt top, and they would gather at someone’s home and sit around the big frame that hangs from the ceiling, and they’d quilt.”
Thelma Hodges, 76, also remembers a quilting frame that once hung from the ceiling when her mother wasn’t using it. Frames like those helped to hold all three quilt layers taut as they were being stitched together.
“When I was little, we played underneath the quilting frame from the time they would set it up,” Hodges said. “My mother, Linda, sewed for the public when I was growing up. She and my grandmother used to quilt, and I just kind of picked it up.”
Hodges picked up sewing as a business like her mother as well, though, she gave up sewing and quilting altogether when she married and started a family. When her youngest children were old enough to start school, she said she turned back to quilting as a pastime.
Several women in the Batting Brigade Quilt Guild have stories similar to Hodges and Sherrod.
Cathy Moor, 77, didn’t pick up quilting until she was introduced to the guild, but she had grown up loathing needles and thread.
“My mother and grandmother and all of them sewed. When I was younger, my mother would make all my clothes, and I got to hem,” she said. “Well, just before I went into the ninth grade — that’s when you’d take Home (Economics) and everything — my mother decided that summer that I was going to make some clothes.”
Moor’s mother set her to working on some skirts and a couple of pairs of pants on her own to help teach her.
“I would sew, and she’d rip out a seam and make me do it again,” Moor said. “So, at the end of that summer, she said, ‘You need to take Home Ec.’ I said, ‘No, no ma’am.’ She said, ‘One day, you’ll have a daughter, and you’ll wish you would have.’
“I had two daughters, and I never wished.”
Though she jokes about the experience now, after Moor retired in 2000, she said she began talking to Phyllis Massenburg, who was a longtime member of the quilt guild and attended church at Edgemont Methodist in Florence, where Moor also attends.
Massenburg talked Moor into coming to an annual quilt show the guild held at the church. Moor said she decided to take on a quilt project.
“Just to see if I could do it,” she said. “So, I went to one of Phyllis’ classes, and through her, I learned to quilt. I’ve made about 60 or so quilts since then, which is unusual for me, but I love to piece the tops. That’s my favorite thing.”
The three ladies said the guild is open to anyone with an interest in quilting, whether they’ve grown up sewing or even if they’ve never threaded a needle.
Sandy Watson, 71, joined the guild in 2017. She’d never quilted up to that point. She got involved after Hodges, who is her sister-in-law, encouraged her to pick up the hobby.
“I came for months and would just sit and watch everything,” Watson said. “The first thing I ever did was a little 18-by-18 kit that I got at Joanne’s Fabrics.”
After she completed the small project, Watson said she sat back again and just enjoyed the socialization she got from the guild meetings each month. Eventually, another project caught her eye.
“There was a lady, Joyce Butler, who came to the guild, and she did a quilt called ‘Turning 20,’” Watson said, explaining the quilt pattern that uses all of 20 fat quarters — or pre-cut pieces of fabric that are typically 18 by 20 inches — with no leftover pieces in its quilt top.
The pieces are called fat quarters because they are wider than a standard quarter-yard cut, which measures 9 by 44 inches.
When Watson saw the quilt, she thought it looked simple enough for her second attempt.
“So, I talked with Joyce after the meeting, and she met with me privately and taught me how to cut it and what to do,” Watson said. “That was really what got me started. It was that ‘Turning 20’ quilt. I’ve only been quilting about seven years now, but I’m enjoying it and learning new things with everything that I do.”
Like Watson and Moor, Liz Linebrink found a passion for quilting later in life.
“My great grandmother quilted, and I remember playing under her hand-quilting frame when I was like 10 or 11,” Linebrink said. “I’d always thought it would be cool to do, but I never, you know, picked it up. That was it, and then we moved away, and I never saw her again.”
Linebrink, now 74, was about 50 years old and living in Picayune, Mississippi, when she walked into a quilt shop in December of 1999 because her son-in-law had expressed an interest in quilting.
While she and her son-in-law were shopping for ideas and supplies, Linebrink met someone who was part of a quilting guild in that community. Linebrink attended her first meeting and was hooked.
She bought her son-in-law a quilting book and a sewing machine for Christmas that year, but she also picked up the craft and officially joined the quilting guild in Picayune. At that time, there were 13 members, she said.
The year she left the guild and moved to the Shoals, there were 85.
“It was a big club,” Linebrink said. “It was a lot of fun, and that lady helped me, and I went from there. It was easy to pick up, but my first quilt I ever made has never been quilted. I still have it on my longarm now.”
When Linebrink joined the Batting Brigade Guild, she found several members there have unfinished projects, or UFOs (unfinished objects) as Watson likes to call them.
“It’s so easy to start one and do several blocks on it, and then we’ll have another workshop,” Watson said. “So, you put that aside, and then you start another one. It’s so awesome. We all have UFOs in our closets. We all have a lot of that.”
For the ladies, who discover new techniques, patterns and even state-of-the-art equipment and gadgets that make modern quilting a cinch, it’s less about the project itself and more about the fun and camaraderie they feel within their group.
“I don’t care how long you’ve been doing this, you can always pick up new ideas,” Hodges said. “Every month, somebody comes up with something different in the meeting, and it’s real interesting. It’s just fun to be with this group.”