Phew! A Finish!

My sewing machine has been going almost non-stop for the past three days, and finally, my Plain and Simple Amish sampler is finished!  This is where I left off yesterday.

When I started today, I added the second border.  By now the quilt has grown large enough that it is hard to photograph.

Fortunately, Matthew showed up before I added the last border, and so he and Mike were enlisted to hold it up for this last picture.  The quilt is 85 inches wide and 103 inches long.  They had to turn it sideways in order to hold it up off the floor.  Hopefully, I can take a better picture of it once it's quilted!

I blogged earlier that this quilt is special to me because my ancestry is Amish.  When I was in graduate school to become a social worker, one of our assignments was to study our family history and to write a paper about it.  (Learning about our families was an exercise in becoming more self-aware, but also in understanding the influence of previous generations on the present day family.)  What follows is a portion of the narrative I wrote about my family, and it tells what little bit I know about my Amish ancestors:

On my mother's side of the family, the original family of immigrants to the new land were Christian Stutzman and Barbara Hochstedler.  Christian was the grandson of Jacob Stutzman, who arrived at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 21, 1727, on the ship "Adventurer" piloted by Captain John Davies.  They left Switzerland because of religious persecution and had gone from Spiez, Switzerland (near Lake Thun) to Rotterdam where the ship set sale.  Jacob lost his wife and all of his children, with the exception of Jacob and Christian, on the voyage.  When they arrived in Philadelphia, he had no money to pay passage so he bound out his sons as indentured servants.  He then returned to the Old Country, leaving his sons in the care of church members of the Amish faith.  

Barbara Hochstetler's father (also Jacob) was attacked and killed by Indians September 20-21, 1757.  Because they were pacifists, they refused to take up arms.  Many family members were slaughtered in this attack.  The settlers were in a great deal of danger from the Indians during this period and they were kept in a constant state of apprehension.  However, their pacifist beliefs were strong.  Some were imprisoned during the American Revolution for refusing to fight.  

I do not know a great deal about the two generations that came after.  Dropping down to the fourth generation and Jonas Miller, however, it is noted that they changed from the Amish to the Brethren faith and also that they migrated from Pennsylvania to Iowa.

Jonas Miller would have been my great-great grandfather, and his son, my grandfather, married Bertha Wise Maust.  My grandfather died when I was a little girl, and I only met him one time.  My grandmother practiced the Brethren faith to her dying day.  Here is a picture of her on the day she married my grandfather:

She made the most beautiful quilts, including this double wedding ring, which is done in the Amish style of all solid fabrics.

And just look at her beautiful hand quilting.

What I know about Amish quilts, I learned from these two books.

Without going into great detail, it is well known that the Amish use only solids in their quilts.  Some of them have so much movement, however, that one would swear there are print fabrics involved.  Here are a few of my favorites.

When I started quilting in 2008, it was with the knowledge that my ancestry was Amish.  My passion for quilting was ignited from looking at my grandmother's beautiful quilts when I was a little girl.  And so when I found the Amish Sampler quilt pattern shortly after I started quilting, I knew I wanted to make it.  I started this quilt on January 5, 2012, and now, one year and one day later, the top is complete!

I'll be sending this quilt off to my long arm quilter this week.  The one I've chosen, Erin Davis, does a beautiful job with traditional quilt designs, and so with just a little bit of instruction, I'll leave my quilt in her capable hands.  She has a waiting list, and so I won't see it again for a couple of months.

I'm linking up to: