Lorene Hill recently decided to make some potholders then decided the potholders would be attractive sewed together for a quilt.

It’s been like that for nearly all of Lorene’s 87 years. She’d take whatever material was available to create a useful or beautiful craft item, whether potholders, quilts, dolls, button necklaces or whirligigs.

“I’d get out of bed and sew when I couldn’t sleep,” said Lorene.

With eight children, one would think there wouldn’t be much time for sewing or crafts, but Lorene’s daughters, Mildred Thompson and Sandra Fleming, say their mother never went to a wedding or baby shower without a handmade item as a gift.

“Summers when we were small girls, we youngest three—me, Ann (Harvey) and Myra (Ridgeway)—went to Miller’s Department Store for material. We’d bring it home Friday and by Sunday she’d have us each a new dress in time for church,” said Fleming.

Grandmother taught her

Lorene Lawrence was just 8 years old when she learned to quilt at her Grandmother Lawrence’s knee.

“I would scrap corn and then take the money and buy quilt pieces,” said Lorene. “They were about 25 cents a bag. But then, that was back when cold drinks were just a nickel, and now they’re a dollar.”

Lorene would sit on the floor by her grandmother’s sewing machine and push the treadle in trade for her sewing lesson. For a child growing up in a family of five sisters and six brothers, such moments of individual attention were rare.

As a teenager, Lorene began to date Elmer “Coot” Hill, with whom she attended church at Shoals Bluff. They were married in 1937, when she was just 17 and Coot 22. The couple had nine children. Their fourth child, John David, died at 15 months of pneumonia after being sickly his whole short life of a congenital disorder that caused his bones to be too soft, leaving him unable to stand or walk.

Seven of Lorene’s babies were born at home and the younger two were born at Athens-Limestone Hospital. Her children are: Mildred Thompson, Marilyn Wooldridge, Bud Hill, Bennie Hill, George Hill, Ann Harvey, Sandra Fleming and Myra Ridgeway.

In a cookbook the family compiled at Christmas, Lorene recalls who named each one of her children. Most of the time it was friends or neighbors who suggested a name for the newest infant, but Sandra was named by her oldest sister Mildred, and Myra was named by Marilyn.

“It didn’t matter to me what any of them was named,” Lorene said in her cookbook.