Hands all around was Pressley's favorite pattern

By Kathryn Byer

Renowned quilter and craftswoman Willa Mae Potts Pressley of Cullowhee's Speedwell community died March 30 after an extended illness. Her legend lives on through the quilts and trained quilters she leaves behind.

Collective nouns like "community" mean little to us until we say the names of real people, with real stories that we have heard in kitchens or backyards or cars traveling down Highway 107 or I-40.

Lately, one name in particular has been on my mind, that of a woman whose friendship has for 20 years made me feel at home in these mountains.

Ever since her death last Thursday morning, I have been thinking about what makes a friendship endure - those memories that keep it always in the present tense.

Willa Mae Pressley was born in the Weyahutta community, where she and her sister Annie Lee grew up learning the art of quilting from their mother, Delphia Potts. I met Willa Mae and Annie Lee thanks to the Cooperative Education Department at Western Carolina University. Asked to teach a six-week poetry class at the Asheville Mall, I found my traveling companions to be two local women - one a quilter, the other a maker of cornshuck dolls.

Each Tuesday we brought our skills to the students in our classes, and on the drives over and back, while I negotiated traffic on I-40, we told each other our stories.

Raised a farm girl like Willa Mae and Annie Lee, I found their stories both a pleasure and a comfort. When Willa Mae told me of her mother and father walking into Sylva on Christmas Eve to buy candy and oranges for their children, who stood waiting by the door well into the night, she concluded, "no orange has ever tasted as good!"

She recounted how years later, when she returned on Easter Sunday to the home place where now a church stood, she didn't hear a word the preacher was saying. "I was out running on the hills again," she explained, with a smile.

Like her mother before her, Willa Mae had her favorite quilt pattern: Hands All Around. One of her quilted pillows in that pattern rests on my sofa. A vest she quilted in that same pattern hung for a while in my closet before being handed on to my friend Lee Smith, whose novels of strong mountain women are stitched in patterns as durable as those Willa Mae once made.

A few years ago Willa Mae had to give up quilting because a stroke left her too weak to hold needle and thread. Since the turn of this year, she lay in the hospital, her quilters' hands idle, IV tubes attached. When I last saw her, we held hands a while and dusted off some of our memories. My daughter's Brownie Scout troop, for example, that I brought to visit her, a dozen lively second-graders pressed close to her quilting frame. The goats she and her husband used to keep in their backyard. Those autumn drives to the Asheville Mall.

I know why Hands All Around remained Willa Mae's favorite pattern. It gives visual expression to what matters - living in a community of real people, whose stories are handed around and on down again and again.

Thrown over our beds or our sofas, or wrapped around our shoulders, it shows us day after day what endures. And why.

Editor's note: Kay Byer, a writer and teacher who lives in Cullowhee, shared this story about Willa Mae Potts Pressley, who died March 30 at age 76.

Hands all around was Pressley's favorite pattern

By Kathryn Byer

Renowned quilter and craftswoman Willa Mae Potts Pressley of Cullowhee's Speedwell community died March 30 after an extended illness. Her legend lives on through the quilts and trained quilters she leaves behind.

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