Note: This continuing series reposts some of the most memorable columns of Suzy’s Fancy, which ran from 2009-2020. This piece originally ran in September 2014.
In 1996, when Christine (Chris) Doskocil retired, there was something she wanted to do—something she had learned as a young girl growing up in a Czech family in Hillsboro, Texas, but had never had the time or space to pursue as a working mother of eight children: She wanted to piece quilts.
She also wanted a way to keep her big family connected after her husband, Bob, passed away in 1991. The couple’s six daughters and two sons were all grown and married with families and busy lives of their own.
Chris decided that quilting would be a good way to ensure that she and her children remained close and saw one another frequently. “When I told my girls what I was going to do, they said, ‘Oh, Mama, you have to make each of us a quilt!’” Chris recalls. “I told them I would piece the tops, but they would have to have to help me quilt them—their own and each other’s, too.”
And so began the Doskocil family quilting bee, a tradition that has been carried out at least once each month on Sunday afternoons for over 20 years.
In that time, each of the eight Doskocil children have gotten their own full-sized (or larger) quilt, and so have most of Chris’s 17 grandchildren.
“We’re working on number fourteen right now. But we keep having to interrupt the quilting on the big quilts because one of the grandkids will have a baby and we have to stop to make a baby quilt,” she laughs, “I now have 15 great-grandchildren and we’ve made baby quilts for all of them.”
Chris herself has a quilt made by the family group. Like most quilters, Chris loves fabrics. Her fabric stash included a collection of feedsacks, one of which her mother had used to make a dress for her when she was a girl.
When it was Chris’s turn to have her own quilt, scraps from that feedsack were included in the top—thus reinforcing the family ties still further. It is, not surprisingly, Chris’s favorite of all the ones they’ve made.
Karen Doskocil is one of Chris’s daughters-in-law who values the time spent over the quilting frame with her family members.
“I am so fortunate to have Chris as my mother-in-law,” she offers. “I have been married to her son for nearly 30 years and dated him for years before we married. She has always been such a gentle, loving woman. I’m amazed at all the things she does every week, volunteering in the community, and she still maintains a perfectly clean house, can sew and quilt circles around the rest of us, still makes kolaches and strudel, and cans and preserves foods like no other. The quilts are the by-product of Chris’s idea of keeping us close as a family through quilting. Our quilting days have been a blessing to our family for all of these years and I cherish the days we set aside for each other.”
The family quilting bee has far exceeded Chris’s expectations.
“Oh, it’s wonderful! There’s something about sitting down and working together on a quilt. We visit and share things and catch up with what’s going on in each other’s lives,” she offers. “Everyone is busy and not everybody can make it every time. Sometimes one will come and quilt for just a little while before they have to go someplace else, but they all try to come as often as they can. I think all families should do it because it really keeps everyone close.”
