From Hyla (Camilla's daughter):
I wrote to Mom and Heather after I had watched the wonderful video from Laurent's visit with his family to Aunt Ruth's apartment in 1990. When the apartment tour got to the bedroom and I saw the white knitted bedspreads I had to pause the video and do a double-take. The puffy 4-leaf motif immediately caught my eye, since this was identical to the ones that were used in the Corabel Tarr bedspread that Mom organized the finishing of! (Notice that one of the signatures on the completed quilt is from Carol Kanis one of Mom's Rowan cousins who was a knitter on the project). This just seemed beyond coincidence. I wondered if anyone from the Sanborn side of the family knew anything about those quilts. Did Aunt Ruth knit them? Were they passed down to her from someone in Aunt Ruth's parents generation? Even the white thin cotton knitting thread looks the same as Corabel's quilt. Very intriguing! Hopefully someone will know more about them.
From Camilla:
Hyla has told about the similarity of Aunt Ruth’s bedspreads in Laurent’s video to the story of my Grandmother Corabel Boyd’s uncompleted bedspread.
After my mother died, Mickey Parlin delivered to me six boxes of 100 year-old crocheting yarn and 72 squares of an unfinished crocheted bedspread. Her instructions were to give the boxes to me. It was a complete surprise to me. I have no idea how Mickey got the boxes or who gave her the instructions to give them to me. I wish I had asked her.
For forty years I did nothing with these boxes.
In 2013, I solicited help from church friends.
The trouble was, there were no instructions with the boxes. We only had a type-written sheet which obviously someone (my mother?) had used to make one of the small single-leaf squares.
We asked advice from a professional knitter who told us that back in that era women made all kinds of improvisations on the four-leaf theme. Why didn’t we improvise a pattern for ourselves? So we did.
Here is a photo of how we knit our basic four-leaf square.
We found a photo of an ancient bedspread with instructions that did not use the elaborate border around the four leaf square that we see on Aunt Ruth’s bedspread. Here is a photo of our completed bedspread.
I have sewn into the corner a quilter- type dedication.
Love, Camilla
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