Free The Quilt Walk by Sandra Dallas

realized Ma would have used her own fabric to cut a strip to replace the missing piece.
    Ma put the scissors down on the quilt pieces that we had laid out so the wind wouldn’t catch them. “What about the next piece, Emmy Blue?” she asked.
    I searched through the strips and picked out a plain dark blue strip of calico. And then, without Ma asking, I picked the next piece, a brown with black flowers, and finished off the square. I frowned at the pieces of material I’d laid out. “How come the first two are light and the next two are dark?” I asked.
    “It’s part of the pattern, the darks on one side, the lights on the other. When you join the quilt squares together, you’ll lay them out in such a way that the darks and lights form a pattern themselves. A Log Cabin quilt is a puzzle within a puzzle.”
    But not a very good one, I thought. Who wanted to put together fourteen puzzles that were just the same, and stitch them at that? I started to stuff the pieces into the sack, but Ma put out her hand. “Not so fast, Emmy Blue. Grandma Mouse gave this to you so that you could quilt on the way to Colorado Territory. It would be ungracious of you not to do as she wants. You don’t have to sit all day and quilt. I know that would tax you. But I expect you to make a full circle of quilt strips each day. That means today you will start out by sewing four pieces around the red center. Tomorrow you can make a second circle of pieces. Why, in four days, you’ll have completed one square. So your quilt top will be done before we reach Golden.”
    “Will you help me?” I asked. Ma was so fast she could be done with all fourteen squares before I finished one.
    But Ma saw what I was up to and gave me a smile. “I will check that each one is done properly, else it will have to be taken out and re-stitched the next day. But I won’t do the stitching myself. There’re many women out there who would refuse to have another woman take a single stitch in her quilt.”
    “Not me.”
    Ma laughed at that. “No, not you, but in time.”
    I turned away, because I wanted to get down from the wagon and find Joey. He didn’t have to sit on the seat and sew. Ma grabbed my dress. “The best time to start is now, Emmy Blue.”
    Ma was firm. So I sighed to show her I was not happy. She took out a threaded needle that was pinned to the underside of her collar—she kept it there so that she could sew whenever she could—and handed it to me. “You can sit beside me on the wagon seat and work.”
    “Or you can quilt as you walk along,” Aunt Catherine said as she walked up beside us. She explained she was tired of sitting and had come to see if Ma wanted to walk with her. Aunt Catherine changed her mind about asking Ma when she saw the pieces of fabric spread out on the wagon seat. “You come with me, Emmy Blue. I have my sewing and you can bring yours. We’ll take a quilt walk.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” I said, glancing ahead at Joey’s wagon. I’d told him I didn’t sew unless I had to, so I didn’t want him to see me on any quilt walk.

Chapter Eleven
    PA DOES MR. BONNER’S WORK

    I finished the first quilt square in three days! It was not because I liked quilting, of course. I knew that the faster I stitched, the sooner the quilt would be done and I could think about other things. So I stitched as I walked along, sometimes with Aunt Catherine, sometimes alone. I even stitched with Joey, who didn’t seem to mind that I was sewing. The piecing went quicker than I’d thought—too fast, Ma said one evening as she examined the quilt square by the light of our campfire.
    “Look at this, Emmy Blue. These stitches are much too large and uneven to be acceptable, and you’ve sewn too close to the edge of the material. If I allow you to keep in the stitches, the fabric will unravel and you’ll have an unsightly seam. You must take them out.”
    “But it’s only a doll’s quilt. Waxy isn’t hard on her quilts. She won’t know