During the annual Sweet Home Christmas Bazaar at Sweet Home High School on Dec. 5, Olga Markert had a vast display of her quilts for sale €“ all of them, as a matter of fact.
After 20 years and hundreds of quilts, Markert, 92, is retiring and looking for a new hobby.
The physical demands of making quilts have gotten to be too much, she said. She has difficulty walking and sitting for too long.
She said that by the time housework is done, which is taking her a little longer than it used to, she doesn’t get much further on her quilts.
Markert started quilting late in life, she said. “When I first started out, I made them for the kids for Christmas presents.”
Then she started selling them at the bazaars, and following Hurricane Katrina, she made them to sell and raise money for the victims of the storm damage.
“I didn’t have too much else to do,” Markert said. “My husband had passed away, so I decided to get a hobby.”
At age 72 she had had some previous experience with a needle and thread, she said.
“I always did a little sewing before I needed something to do with my time.”
When her children were little, she would make clothes for them, said her son, Bill Markert of Sweet Home.
“I made them out of the back of my husband’s pants,” Olga Markert said.
“Now I have to figure out a new hobby,” she said. “You’ve got to keep doing something.”
Markert was born in Idaho. Her family moved to Montana when she was about a year old when her father settled a homestead claim.
Markert grew up in Montana and then married Fritz Markert. They moved to Pennsylvania where she worked in a nursing home for six years.
“They were back and forth between Pennsylvania and Oregon a couple of times,” said Bill Markert. The family settled permanently in Oregon in 1969, the year Fritz died.
She spent most of her life as a homemaker, she said. She reared four sons and a daughter, including Bill Markert, John Markert and Cathy McDowell of Sweet Home and Tony Markert and Fred Markert.
She met Fritz while he was working for her father in Montana. Fritz had come to the United States from Germany to find work, a natural fit in a way.
“My folks were German,” Olga Markert said. “I didn’t know a lot of English until I went to school. We automatically spoke more German.
“The kids in school used to laugh at the words we said.”
Fritz was a pipe organ builder, Bill Markert said. He was a cabinet maker while living in Switzerland and prior to getting into the organs. He would build the console for the organ. The keyboards and pipes were manufactured in Germany and shipped to the United States where they would be assembled with the console.
“He could tune them, but he couldn’t play,” he said.
Olga still has a number of quilts left following the bazaar. They range from more traditional patterns, small and large, to pictures. One quilt depicts the 50 states and the 50 state birds and flowers. Another, which was sold, shows Indians, horses and birds.
She would spend three or four days to make a queen-sized quilt.
“One thing about them, the batting stays together,” Olga said. “It doesn’t fall apart.”
This is unlike old-style batting that falls apart and makes quilts lumpy.
They are thinner too but they keep you warm, she said.
Anyone interested in her quilts may contact her at 367-2744.