It’s nicely morbid, but can claim real historical roots if anyone complains. Anyway, if you like to quilt (or would like to learn–it’s truly less daunting than you think), this would be a fun project. Yeah, that’d be a hoot, wouldn’t it? Going to visit Aunt Agatha and seeing the little coffin with your name on it, just waiting…. When a relative died, the coffin bearing his/her name was removed and sewed permanently in the center or graveyard area, along with the date of death. Now for the fun part: Appliques in the shape of toe-pincher coffins, each embroidered with the name of a family member, were loosely basted on the quilt’s border. These quilts were sometimes also embroidered with vines, flowers, and other funerary symbols. They were usually done in somber shades of grey or brown and consisted of a plain center (the graveyard) surrounded by either pieced blocks (star, nine-patch, etc.) or by appliques such as a picket fence.

As with most other types of patchwork quilt, they appear to have originally been an American invention. “Coffin Quilts date from the days when people were rubbing up against death all the time, so it was treated a little more matter-of-factly than it is today. As the killings, abductions, and heartbreak escalate bitterly and senselessly, Fanny, the sole voice of reason, realizes that she is powerless to stop the fighting and must learn to rise above the petty natures of her family and neighbors and to find her own way out of the hatred.” Quoted from the back of the book.

In 1822, when Fanny’s sister Roseanne runs off with young Johnse Hatfield, the hatred between the two clans explodes. From that day forward, the Hatfields and McCoys have operated not within the law but within mountain codes of their own making.

By: Kennedy Boyce, Darlena Poling, and Brittany KeeslingĢ The Coffin Quilt “Fanny McCoy has lived with fear and anger ever since that day in 1878 when a dispute with the Hatfields over the ownership of a few pigs set her family on a path of hatred and revenge.

The Blue Door by Ann Rinaldi