“My mom was an avid crafter. She enjoyed a variety of them and did them all extremely well. She didn't give very many of them away to anyone except me. She didn't want to give them to anyone who did not respect the amount of work that went into them. Mom liked to have several quilts in various stages of preparation from boxes of material to the final stage of quilting. Depending on what was going on at the time, she always had something to work on. Both of my children from a previous marriage have Mom's Double Wedding Rings ready for when they are older. In the meantime, I am their keeper. Mom always had quilts on the backs of the chairs and the couches. There was always something ready into which we could snuggle.”

Lyn started her first quilt “thirty some odd years ago.” She and her mother spent the day going to the fabric store and looking over the fabrics because she wanted her quilt to be colour-coordinated. Her mother had a very good eye for making colours work well together. She taught Lyn how to make the pattern, trace it on to her fabric, cut it, and then to sort it by blocks so she could take them with her whenever they went on a road trip.

“Grandmother's Fan was an easy one for a beginner. I quilted this so that the fan showed on the back and added a butterfly in the upper portion of the squares. This quilt was done completely by hand. There is not a single machine stitch in it and it took me five years to complete. My family thought I would never get it done. We lived on my folks property at the time and Mom and I often got together to cut pieces for one of her quilts.”

Lyn made this quilt for her son
and his new wife.

“I was with my mom for the last five months of her life. She passed away last year and one of her last wishes was to have finished her purple Lancaster Rose quilt for my Dad. After her death I returned to my home, my life, my work, and my family. Being a working mom, I just didn't have time to sit down and hand quilt and a local fabric shop owner suggested that I have it professionally quilted. Until then, I had never heard of such a thing but began my search for a longarm quilter.”

Lyn found a local longarm quilter. She was already booked for the holiday season but promised to do her best to complete the quilt for Christmas. During that time, she and her husband visited her and were able to spend time watching her at work. Lyn became very excited about longarm quilting and explains, “It was something that just tripped my trigger!” She discussed becoming a longarm quilter with her husband and having been told about a local woman who was selling her Gammill machine, she bought it.

Until that point in her life, Lyn had been working as a blackjack dealer for nearly 15 years and was ready to move on. Ten hour days of standing on concrete were taking their toll on her legs. Her husband strongly supported her career change to quilting and remodeled and converted two of their upstairs bedrooms into a studio for her.