The Meeting House was built after QuiltersVillage was pretty well established, and now serves as a gathering place for all sorts of events. Town meetings are held each month in the hall, and auctions at the Meeting House have gained a certain reputation for churning up all sorts of textile treasures. Quilt collectors regularly request to be notified of upcoming events. And Sadie, the quiltmaker, is always scheduling trunk shows and quilting bees.
You may think that quilting bees have been left to the past, what with the upsurge of machine quilting these days, but the ladies in QuiltersVillage still relish the tradition. It gives them a chance to put aside day-to-day tasks, and get together for some good old-fashioned gossip. Of course, they tell everyone that they're just 'catching up on town events,' and they do turn out some mighty fine hand quilting.
Almost every Saturday night, the Meeting House hosts a dance. The style of dance and dress has changed over the years, but the event is pretty much the same. Everyone dons their finest attire, and the ritual begins, with boys on one side of the room and young ladies on the other. Eventually, some brave soul breaks the ice, and soon the floor is filled with bodies swaying together in rhythm with whatever music is popular at the time.
That's how Ann Emerson met Ted Bailey.
She was wearing a dress of pale blue dotted swiss that softly set off her blonde curls and brought out the brightness of her eyes. Ann was the perfect picture of a proper young lady. Ted was another image altogether. His green plaid shirt clashed horribly with the shock of coarse red hair growing out of his head. He looked like an overgrown leprechaun, but he wasn't nearly as nimble. He stumbled over his own two feet when he crossed the room to ask Ann to dance. To everyone's astonishment, she accepted. It may have been the first, last and only time they ever danced, and it was a miracle that nothing was broken.
I can't say it was love at first sight. But in the end they settled down together and raised three sons in Bailey's Blue House. With three boys, Ann became quite accomplished at patching things: knees in britches, elbows in shirts, scraped knuckles or even an occasional broken bone. And, she's an absolute expert at creating scrap patchwork pieces, blending bits of cotton and calico into fine fabric images.
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