After more than 60 years, Ephraim woman completes grandmother’s quilt

EPHRAIM—The story behind a quilt displayed at the Sanpete County Fair, a quilt that won a blue ribbon and a People’s Choice Award, dates back at least to 1963, and depending on how you interpret the story, as far back as 1931.

The quilt was created by Teri Morris, 79, of Ephraim from quilt squares that went on the market in 1931. She inherited the squares after her paternal grandmother, Eva Mayer Rich, died of multiple sclerosis in 1963 in Price when Teri was just 16.

Teri believes that over 60-plus years between her grandmother’s death and a couple of weeks before the fair, her grandmother was spiritually prompting her to finish the quilt.

Teri’s paternal grandparents, Leonard and Eva Rich, lived in Dragerton, Carbon County, where her grandfather worked in the coal mines.

She remembers her grandmother as always being in a wheelchair. Her grandmother raised three sons. Teri was her first granddaughter. Because she was the first female child in her grandmother’s life, she’s pretty sure she was special to her grandmother.

Teri isn’t quite sure when her grandmother sent off for quilt squares representing 48 states, the number of states in the United States at the time. Each square had the state flower of the named state on it.

Her grandmother started working on a quilt using the squares, Teri says. But because of her M.S., she started having trouble with her hands. She kept trying to work on the quilt, her granddaughter says. “But she got to where she couldn’t quilt at all, so she put away the squares.”

After her grandmother died, Teri says, her grandfather gave her the squares and gently suggested that her Grandmother Rich had wanted her to finish the quilting project. She said, “Yes, I’ll do that. And maybe I’ll make them into a big quilt.”

“Yes, do that,” her grandfather said.

When Teri was 3, her parents moved from Carbon County to Kearns in Salt Lake County, where her father used the G.I. bill to train to build television sets. Teri graduated from Granger High School.

In 1969, when she was in her early 20s, she married Glen Morris of Salt Lake City. They had three children and lived in Kearns, Murray and Sanday. Her husband ran a successful auto repair and towing business, and restored classic cars.

Both Teri and Glen Morris had pioneer ancestors from Sanpete County. By 1992, they had built a a new home in Wales and moved in. They also bought an historic house, the Pehrson House, on Main Street in Ephraim, where Teri operated a bed-and-breakfast inn.

About 2000, when Teri was in her mid-50s, and 37 years after her Grandmother Eva Rich had died, she saw a quilting magazine in Deseret Industries. She picked it up and opened it. “Right on the page that I opened” was a picture of the identical quilt squares her grandmother had left her. That’s when she learned the squares has been designed in 1931 and sold as a package.

“I thought, ‘I’ve got that quilt somewhere,” Teri says. She had moved several times, but nonetheless found the squares and put the magazine article with them.

“And I promised myself I would finish it” because she believed the chance finding of the magazine article, which refocused her attention on the quilt, was “a message from somebody up there,” namely her grandmother.

“But life just kept going,” she says. In 2009, Glen Morris had a stroke and died. About a year later, Teri married again to a “wonderful guy” named Chris Willardson. To avoid complications with social security and Medicare, she decided to keep her former name.

Years passed. Recently, she says, she realized she was 79. She said to herself, “It’s almost over. I don’t have another 20 years. I don’t even have 10 years maybe.” And she thought, “Where is that quilt?”

She found a “hope chest” where she had put the quilt squares and magazine article. Then she remembered other quilts. She had started one for her daughter. “I’ll finish hers,” she decided. And she remembered a third quilt, featuring elaborately stitched stars, that she had received from her maternal grandmother at the time that grandmother died. It was mostly finished but needed a binding. “I’ll finish that one, too,” she decided.

She decided to enter all three quilts in the Sanpete County Fair. In particular, she wanted to show the quilt made from the state-flower squares because “I wanted to share the story.” Since then, people who saw the quilt and read information displayed with it have told her they “are almost in awe that this stuff just came together.”

She started looking for a fabric that she could sew the squares onto. She couldn’t find anything suitable. Then in July, a little more than a month before the fair, she went to the Amazon website and entered the term, “patriotic fabric.” A picture popped up of red fabric decorated with hearts containing red and white stripes, a blue fields and stars. The material also had small vertical American flags and log cabins.

She says she knew immediately it was the fabric she needed to finish her grandmother’s quilt. “I ordered 9 yards of it.”

She put the squares in alphabetical order by state name and started sewing them onto the fabric with her sewing machine. “I worked on it night and day,” she says.

She says she decided to stick with the 48 states represented in the original quilt squares. “That’s the way Grandma had it, and this is the way it’s going to be. I can still do Hawaii and Alaska, but I can make them as pillow shams.”

She bought a bedsheet for the underside of the quilt. When she was ready to quilt a design into the piece and thereby sew the quilt top batting and sheet together, she turned to Vicki Stitchen, who specializes in machine quilting.

But Stitchen had come down with shingles. She told Teri, “It’s going to be a while.” Teri told her she wanted to show the quilt at the Sanpete County Fair, which was two weeks away. “Bring it over,” Vicki said. The next day, Vicki called back. “It’s done,” she said.

There was one more step: Sewing a border and binding, both dark blue, around the outside of the quilt. She did that sewing by hand. “I stayed on that for two days solid. Then I knew it was ready to go. I was so excited.”

Meanwhile, she put together her daughter’s quilt, which came out of kit from a craft store, and sewed a binding around her maternal grandmother’s quilt. All three quilts were displayed at the Exhibit Hall at the Sanpete County Fair.

While she was working on the quilt, she says, she sometimes started crying. Her husband asked, “What’s going on with you?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” she responded. “It’s just an emotional fit.”

But she says she knows that from the time she inherited the quilt squares, her Grandmother Rich had been prompting her. “You can’t explain things like that,” she says. “When you have a guardian angel, you have one, and I know she’s been there and still is.”

She says she was planning to put the quilt on a bed, but her husband said, “No, you’re going to hang that on a wall.”