WHAT: Program by Joan N. Northen, quilt preservationist and historian

WHEN: noon Tuesday

WHERE: 219 King Circle, Temple

NOTE: This is a meeting of the City Federation of Women’s Clubs

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She owns more than 230 quilts.

Most of them were rags when she got them. But that’s normal for a quilt preservationist like Joan Northen of the Three Forks Community.

“I get them when their all torn up and worn through,” Mrs. Northen said. “Then I work to make it look like how it did when it was new.”

Restoring quilts makes a nice job for her, she said, now that she’s retired from teaching school.

She keeps a scrapbook of all the quilts she repairs. For each project she undertakes, there’s a before and after picture accompanied by a written record of how she altered the original.

Her stitch work is so precise that the repaired quilt looks as if it was never damaged.

“The trick is to use the original material,” Mrs. Northen said. “There’s no way to match colors from a hundred years ago.”

To illustrate, she talked about a blue and white quilt with a picket-fence design. Its before photo showed that some of the inside blocks were ruined with quarter-size holes.

“But the outside row was fine,” Mrs. Northen said. “So I cut that off and used the fabric to repair the pattern on the inside.

“It made the overall quilt smaller, but it saved the design.”

She’s spent a lifetime developing her skill. Her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were her teachers.

It’s not just the sewing and design that interest her.

“Quilts are pieces of history,” said Mrs. Northen. “I’m a nosy lady with a history degree, so whenever I see a name or a date, I set out to find the story behind it.”

One of her favorite finds is a 1925 Cox lineage quilt she bought at an antique store.

“I could tell by the thickness of it that there was another quilt inside,” she said. “That inner-quilt is even older, about 40 to 50 years older.”

The names on the outer quilt formed a family tree for the Coxes.

“It turned out that I had some of my own lineage,” Mrs. Northen said “A (relative) was the 1913 KHS valedictorian.”

Such experiences keep Mrs. Northen’s eye on the lookout for more and more quilts.

“Each quilt tells a story if you know what to look for,” she said.

People wanting to swap quilt stories with Mrs. Northen are welcome to email her at 3forks@clearwire.net. Fellow enthusiasts can also attend next week’s City Federation meeting to hear her discuss the history of her favorite set of signature quilts.

--tlunsford@temple-telegram.com