Flower Basket Quilt

I have asked Elaine to write about this book which she has reread during the past week. Grace Snyder, the matriarch of a pioneer Nebraska family wrote her reminiscences in her 80th year and were put into "book form" by her daughter Nellie Snyder Yost. 

Grace's story began on the high plains of Nebraska, where her parents homesteaded in 1885. She recalls her childhood in a sod house on a frontier that required everyone to pull together in the face of hostile weather, serious illness, and economic depression but that also held its share of good times. She wrote that as a child of age 7, she wished that she might grow up to make the most beautiful quilts in the world, to marry a cowboy, and to look down on the top of a cloud. While her dreams and wishes seemed impossible at the time, she eventually saw them in reality. Her quilts contributed to a worldwide revival of quiltmaking. Grace lived 20 years after the publication of these memoirs in 1963, to the age of 100. Elaine bought the book some years ago when the "Flower Basket" quilt shown in the picture, was on display at Quilt Museum on the Campus of the University of Nebraska.

.