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Edna Cotton has been sewing for 70 years.
For Edna Cotton, quilting and sewing has been more than just creating beautiful blankets. It’s been therapeutic as well.
Cotton was a 911 dispatcher for 20 years, a high-stress job if there ever was one. A dispatcher often sees the worst of humanity, and sometimes the best. A good one has to be able to multi-task. Talk on the radio to an officer. Talk on the phone to the caller. And work on the computer all at the same time. She loved the job.
“It takes a certain person to do it,” she said in an interview last week.
She recalled one call years ago where an elderly man apologized for calling, but he couldn’t find his wife. The woman had gone boating with her grandchildren in a local slough and the boat had floated away from them when they were on shore.
The woman swam out to get it, but never returned. The ALERT helicopter, which was already in the air due to a wildfire in the area, spotted her body in the water.
She had drowned.
But the man kept saying he was sorry.
“He apologized for calling because he couldn’t find her,” Cotton recalled.
After days like that Cotton would come home and sew for several hours, crafting gorgeous quilts over the years. She’s been sewing for 70 years. She grew up in Augusta and her mother taught her to sew her own clothes at the age of 8.
“I learned to sew on an old treadle machine that used to be my great-grandmother’s,” she said.
Her mom sewed out of necessity and for pleasure. They didn’t have a lot of money.
“She made clothes out of hand-me-downs,” Cotton said. “A lot of times she didn’t use a pattern.”
Her mother later gave the sewing machine away to a woman with four children whose husband walked out on her.
Cotton has been quilting for 25 years now. Her favorite themes hail from the Southwest, rich colors of the desert and golden hour when the sun is low adorn her works.
She used to do the actual quilting — the intricate pattern of thread designs that finishes a quilt — on her own, spreading the quilt on the living room floor and crawling around on her hands and knees to feed the material into her machine.
She doesn’t do that today.
“I can’t crawl anymore,” she said with a smile.
Cotton will be the featured quilter this year at the upcoming Teakettle Quilt Guild Show next month.
She’s been a member for about five years.
“It’s a wonderful guild,” she said. “They’re such good people.”
The show is at Glacier Gateway Elementary from 9 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. April 18. The show features dozens of quilts all displayed in the gym, as well as vendors and supplies.
It’s the highlight quilting event in Columbia Falls each spring.
Admission is free.