On a mild, showery day in August, Laverne Brackens sits in her bedroom with her daughters Lily Mays and Betsy Johnson. This is also her workroom, where she pins together cloth and sews while watching The Price Is Right on a TV mounted on a wall. Outside hangs a faded vinyl banner with black letters spelling out “Quilts of Color: Four Generations.” Buyers can call her and request personal quilts made with fabric she has at her shop or fabric that they ship to her.
Sitting in her chair, she asks her daughters to pull out a vacuum-sealed bag with four quilts rolled and packed gingerly inside. Many are quilts Brackens stitched with members of her family—her grandchildren, her daughters, her mother.
Mays and Johnson pull out a quilt blooming with fuchsia and purple diamonds, stitched together like an explosion of geometric spears. Brackens, 93, named the quilt the Texas Star. When she completed it only a few years after retiring in 1987, many people tried to purchase the piece from her, offering thousands of dollars. But she refused to be coaxed. Her own mother, a seamstress, had helped her with the stitching—and restitching.
