With the approach of International Women’s Day on March 8, I’ve been thinking about strong women from the past who didn’t make it into the history books, including my maternal grandmother Louie Carnegie Reeder, who raised 11 children on the prairies through the Great Depression.

During the recent bout of frigid weather, I huddled under the beautiful flower petal patterned quilt she’d made out of old flour bags and scraps of fabric left over from the dresses, pyjamas and shirts she’d sewn for her family.

Always wearing an apron, Grandma went through about 100 lbs of flour a month, an unbelievable amount these days, working to bake eight loaves of bread every other day, along with all the buns, pies, muffins and cakes to feed everyone on the wheat farm. For school lunches, she used to make bran muffins, called graham gems, spread with honey and placed in a honey pail.

Nothing went to waste back then.

Once the flour bags were empty, they were cut up, and sewn into diapers, pillowcases trimmed with embroidery, dresser runners, tea towels, tablecloths, quilts, shirts for the boys, and dresses for the girls. Clothes were usually dyed different colours so they could tell whose was whose.

The bags were made out of raw cotton, perhaps from India or China, which was quite durable, but creased easily. They had to be washed, bleached, dampened and ironed. Grandma also braided rugs out of old stockings and wool remnants.

She was the expert at making something from nothing.

Everything on the farm was recycled. They were environmentally conscious back then, out of necessity. You had to “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” — a favourite saying during the 1930s.

Interestingly, this philosophy is enjoying a comeback, with the popularity of repair cafés.

Were she alive today, Grandma would be in great demand, sharing her expertise as a “fixer.” Unfortunately, the sewing genes bypassed me, part of a generation who saw the “womanly arts” as a form of oppression.

Many of the flour bags used in the quilt I have came from Quaker Oats here in Peterborough. In 1929, it was the largest cereal miller in the British Empire. Their slogan was “the happy baker uses Quaker.”

I imagine in the depths of winter, Grandma, her daughters and her friends clustered around the cast iron wood stove to get through it, huddling close beside each other to stay warm. And what better activity to do when there are no flowers around, than to have a quilting bee and create them yourself by sewing permanent petals out of colourful material?

I remember as a child on a visit out west, playing with my baby cousin on the kitchen floor. I asked Grandma if there were any toys around for me to amuse her with, and Grandma gave me some jar lids and pots and said, “Babies don’t need expensive toys to keep them occupied — the most ordinary things will do.”

And she was right. My little cousin was happy as a clam banging on the pots and throwing the lids around.

The quilts we had growing up were used daily and are now frayed beyond repair.

This one would have been a later creation, tucked away on a top shelf. It’s a tangible reminder of my grandmother’s philosophy that we have all we need to make our lives whatever we want them to be.

And it’s a reminder of the kind and gentle soul who created beauty around her, turning flour bags into flowers, while making the most of her limited resources on the dry, dusty prairies.

© Peterborough Examiner