WEST UNION – “Seventy years ago, people made more of what they had than they do now,” Bess Traeger said. Thinking back to when she was a little girl growing up on a farm near Hawkeye, she remembers that her mother, Mrs. Levi Book, was always busy but also very creative.

Between cooking and baking, gardening and canning, cleaning and sewing, “My mother made the most beautiful quilts. I had three sisters, and Mother would use scraps from our worn out dresses and pinafores – even the rickrack and crocheted lace – for her quilts.

“And she would make fondants and form roses to decorate cakes. My mother was a good cook. I can remember helping her by doing dishes while standing on a chair.

“Mother didn’t have a sewing room to spread her work,” Bess said, “so Mother would sew at the kitchen table or any place she could find room.”

Bess sat beside her, stitching up doll clothes. It seemed to go so slowly, sewing those little outfits by hand. Bess would give anything if her mother would let her try out the treadle machine. “But I wasn’t allowed to play with it,” she remembers.

“Once when I was about six, my mother went outside and I decided to use her machine. I was pushing the material back and ran the needle through my finger. It pinned me to the machine. When she came in, I was crying.”

That was punishment enough her mother figured. “It was a good lesson.” Bess said.

Bess continues to sew and to quilt. But she has never tried to duplicate the pretty lavender and white quilt made by her mother in 1932. “I don’t know how she made such perfect circles.” she said.

Each butterfly on the quilt is made of the childhood dresses and pinafores of Bess and her three sisters. Butterfly wings are edged in bits of rickrack or crocheted lace that had trimmed those dresses. Nothing was wasted. And the colors are as bright and fresh as if the quilt was made yesterday.

In the center circle, along with the date, are a little girl and boy embroidered in a field of flowers and tiny butterflies. The children’s clothes are appliqued and embroidered, and the little boy carries a bouquet of flowers.

“My dad would always say, “I have four girls, but none of them can do what their mother did.” And he was right. She could have been an artist,” Bess said.

Bess and her three younger sisters were named after four neighbor girls that her parents were fond of – Bessie, Mabel, Hazel and Ruth.

“I didn’t like my name,” she said. “so my dad always called me Bess. When I was born, a neighbor came by and asked, ‘Oh, what did you name the little girl?’ ‘Bessie,’ my dad replied.

‘Oh, I like that,’ the neighbor said, ‘I have a cow named Bessie.’”

Bess bristled and said, “You know, whenever there’s a television show with any ornery old mule on it, it seems they always call it Bessie!”

Bess gave her own daughter the name Alice. She, too, was named “after a neighbor who had a sweet little Alice.”