My mother taught me to sew when I was about ten.

She lost her mother when she was five and was raised by her dad and older brothers on a small farm — depression-era not-quite-poverty. I saw the farmhouse when I was little and found it shockingly plain and small; her three or four dresses had fit on a few nails in the wall.

After high school she went to live with a beloved aunt in St. Louis, who was a veritable Martha Stewart and taught her all the household arts, including sewing. I think she became a whole new person in those years. Later, Mom taught me and my sister how to sew clothes and make quilts from the scraps.

Since then: fifty years of quilting, a stretch working for Bali Fabrications in the San Francisco Bay Area, a shop in Marietta, Georgia, a quilt guild in St. Petersburg, Florida — and one rescue poodle, Cookie, who is pieced into the car cover.

I love the scrap quilts best of all. I don't know why the quilts I make often get so big.