Let me tell you about my friend Frank Day of Roland, OK, whom I have known since approximately 1971 when we both worked for Hunt’s Department Store in Fort Smith, Ark.
Frank was a recent graduate of Northeastern State University in Tahlequah and I was a senior at Southside High School.
Over the years, we drank gallons of coffee together, ran trot lines at 2 am in the Arkansas River and stalked raccoons in the middle of the night in the Paw Paw Bottoms, among other adventures.
But life took me to Oklahoma City in 1983 for a job with The Daily Oklahoman newspaper, so we haven’t seen a lot of each other in the intervening years.
Today Frank is 75 years old and retired after more than two decades as fleet sales manager for Fort Smith’s Randall Ford. I think he can best be described in 2025 as a one-man quilting bee.
What?
That’s right. Frank Day began hand-stitching beautiful quilts over two decades ago, and continues his quilting avocation today.
Frank, I thought I knew you.
There goes my image of the typical quilter as someone’s grandmother.
Turns out that quilting is something Frank learned as a child from his mother, Dortha Day and turned it into an ongoing hobby many decades later.
“When I grew up, Mother was quilting all the time,” Frank told me. “She belonged to a quilting club, a bunch of women who got together at someone’s house and could finish a quilt in one day. I grew up watching her, and she showed me how to do it.”
Frank’s wife of more than 50 years, Vicki, added her perspective.
“Frank’s mother Dortha always had a quilt rack on the ceiling,” Vicki said. “I remember Granny, everyone called her Granny, quilting on the old quilting frames and singing hymns. When the grandchildren came along they would all play under the quilt frame.”
However, Frank had never made a quilt until his first grandchild was born more than 20 years ago. He produced his first quilt for grandson, Trevor, and has continued quilting through the years.
“I said I’m going to get some material and make a quilt,” Frank said of that first attempt. “Vicki said ‘you don’t know how.’ I said, ‘you watch me.’ I got the material and sat down and started sewing. And I got it done.”
That first quilt led into one for each grandchild, then special quilts for relatives and friends. Sometimes he makes them for folks who’ve had a stretch of bad health or difficult life situation, like a former coworker at Randall Ford to whom he presented a quilt.
“She started crying, but it was because she was happy to get it,” Frank said.
A quilt is not made in a day. Or a week. It might require more than a month of work for a solo quilter like Frank Day.
“From start to finish, if it’s a king-sized quilt, you have about 250 hours in it,” he said. “That’s cutting the material out — I hand sew everything, nothing is made on a machine. I hand stitch it, get the backing for it, get the lining for it and put the blocks on top.”
Did you catch that … 250 hours for a single quilt. That’s 6-1/4 40-hour working weeks of quietly sitting alone stitching blocks of material together into what can be a beautiful pattern.
My own grandmother was a quilter, and I recall she had a large wooden frame that she let down from the ceiling that helped her make her quilts.
Frank uses a ‘hoop’ that he holds in his lap as he quilts. Usually, one of his favorite dogs is sitting nearby or even on his lap as he quietly works.
Although he hasn’t made quilts to sell, Frank told me that comparable hand-made quilts can be priced at $1,800-$2,500 because of all the time required to produce one.
“It’s very time consuming, and most people don’t have the patience for it,” he said.
I learned that Frank was a quilter after Vicki posted some pictures of beautiful quilts on Facebook and I complimented her on her quilting talent. She corrected me and said it was all Frank.
“When Frank made his first quilt before Trevor, our first grandchild, was born, we had been married for 30 years and he never made one before,” Vicki said. “I asked him why he never made one before and his answer was “I never had a reason to make one.”
“Frank’s quilting has bloomed over the years. He made one for our son, Paul, as a wedding gift and then for our daughter Jenny. He made one out of cancer warrior scarves that Ford gave to dealerships for Breast Cancer Awareness.”
Each quilt is made with a purpose.
“Frank had a good friend, Dudley Sparkman, who was the best man and friend you could ask for,” Vicki said. “Sadly, he had a massive heart attack on his 50th birthday and passed around two weeks later. Tina Sparkman, Dudley’s wife, asked Frank if he would make a lap quilt out of some of his shirts. That was probably one of the hardest quilts he ever made because on the friendship they shared.”
Quilters like Frank Day who make the time to sit and hand-stitch a beautiful design are a rarity in 2025. Today, most quilts are machine stitched.
Frank calls hand-made quilting a “dying art” that he’s keeping alive in his corner of the world. Currently, he’s working on a quilt for Vicki as he recovers from a recent knee-replacement surgery.
“It’s helped me keep my sanity when I’ve had to sit for long stretches as I recovered from knee surgery that put me down,” he said. “I’ve finished one and got close to half of another one put together.”
It’s one stitch after another after another for a quilter like Frank Day. That translates into hundreds of hours to produce just one quilt.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Frank has run that marathon for more than two decades.
And that’s why I describe him as the ultimate one-man quilting bee.
BONUS CONTENT:
I asked ChatGPT to explain the concept of a “Quilting Bee” to me. Here’s what it told me:
A quilting bee is a social gathering where a group of people—traditionally women—come together to work on quilting projects, usually a large quilt, while also enjoying conversation and community.
Key Features:
– Collaboration: Multiple people contribute to making one quilt. Often, the quilt top is pieced together ahead of time, and the bee focuses on quilting (stitching the layers together).
– Social aspect: It’s as much about socializing and bonding as it is about the sewing. These gatherings were historically important social events, especially in rural communities.
– Tradition: Quilting bees have roots in 18th and 19th century America, when they served as a practical and communal way to create bedding before mass production.
– Modern bees: Today, quilting bees still exist, though they might be less formal or might happen in quilting guilds, workshops, or even online.
Think of a quilting bee as a mix of a sewing circle, a social event, and a creative collaboration.
Jim Stafford's BlogOKC 