Constance’s Marriage Quilt

In The Sugar Camp Quilt, Constance, a slave in Virginia, saves her mistress’s discarded scraps of fabric. When Abel Wright, a freeman dairy farmer from the Elm Creek Valley, asks her to marry him, she sews the scraps into a beautiful string-pieced star wedding quilt while she awaits the day he can purchase her freedom, placing her trust in Abel’s love and in his vow to bring her to freedom in the North. The pattern for “Constance’s String Pieced Star” appears in my third pattern book, More Elm Creek Quilts (C&T Publishing, 2008).