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By PENNY FLETCHER
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Jan Ring has been working on her mother’s 90th birthday present for seven months. Based on a “memory quilt” she made for her parents’ 60th anniversary some years ago, Jan took the idea several steps farther and included tributes from friends and family.
Jan Ring of Sun City Center wanted to give her mother something really special for her 90th birthday so she contacted her mom’s old friends and members of her church. Then she sent them quilt squares onto which they each sewed a personal memory or tribute. After stitching all the squares together, Jan plans to hand-deliver the quilt in late May when she travels to Ohio for a multi-generational birthday party. Penny Fletcher Photos
The former emergency room nurse from Ohio moved to Sun City Center five years ago to be near her sister Mim Quast. “We now live just a few houses apart,” she said. Jan had lived in Wesley Chapel since 1984 and worked at University Community Hospital in Tampa. When she moved to South County, she was employed at South Bay Hospital until her retirement a year ago.
“Since I’ve been here I’ve been really busy,” she said humorously referring to the contrast to what the word “retirement” implies.
Recently, the mother of two grown sons and three grandsons has been busy sewing together quilt squares. And more quilt squares.
And more quilt squares.
Unlike anything she has ever made before, there was no way to plan the design for this quilt because it was not her own.
“I sent quilt squares to my mother’s old friends and contacted her church up North,” Jan said. While her mother assumed that most of her old friends were deceased, Jan was still able to get some names, and those friends remembered other friends. “One woman called me and asked for 12 more squares. It was fun to see what would come in the mail.”
Jan sent the first squares out right before Thanksgiving and asked for them to be returned by Jan. 1.
“People from 1-year-old to 103 contributed,” she said, showing me tracings of babies’ hands; Bible verses; original poetry; and scanned photographs transferred to fabric. “I got so many I had to put squares on the back.”
During this project, Jan said she found that you can scan photographs in a printer and then put freezer paper on the back of fabric and print it on the fabric right from a computer printer. “I just put the fabric in the place where the paper would normally go,” she said.
She would ask the people designing the squares to use fabric marker.
One aunt, Arvetta Rusmisel Landis, helped with the family tree.
 The Internet was also a big help. “I’d Google the names of friends and get addresses and telephone numbers of people in their 80s and 90s. One friend of mother’s, who is nearly blind, even did a square. Another woman sent the fabric back with a note saying ‘I don’t have fabric marker, please copy’ and she wrote her name on paper.”
Another woman traded housekeeping for someone to stitch a beautiful flower on her square.
Her mother, Catherine Early, lives in Lima, Ohio. As it turns out, she has friends in lots of places.
“I plan to go up there in late May and we’re having a family party in June,” Jan said. “Mother’s birthday was May 12 but the family is waiting until all the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are out (of school) on summer vacation.”
Jan ended up with more than 60 completed squares and has applied the backing and stitched them together in the Sew & Sews Room.
“These are really ‘art quilts,’ ” she said. “They’re not meant to be used. I like to think that this will be part of our family history a hundred years from now.”
Jan’s love of history and historical things is what first interested her in quilts, she said. She first started quilting in 1984 when she inherited several quilts. After experimenting with the craft herself, she eventually took a class.
Now many others are interested in quilting because of her project.
“They painted, embroidered, did Scripture verses and signed their signatures,” she said. “Next to her recent picture I’ve put, ‘It took 90 years to look this good.’ ”
Anyone who sees it can’t help but know the huge memory quilt is truly a labor of love.
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