Out of Whole Cloth: The Life of Bettye Kimbrell

From years of recorded interviews with Bettye Kimbrell, an acclaimed Alabama quilter, Joyce Cauthen shaped an absorbing narrative of a woman--abandoned by her mother when she was 8 years old, married when she was 13, a mother at 14--whose sole aim in life was to create "out of whole cloth" a good life for the five children she had with her charming but unfaithful husband. Bettye, born in 1936, describes in vivid detail her life on tenant farms in rural Fayette County and her move as a young mother to Mt. Olive, near Birmingham, where she focused on creating a secure home for her children. In the second half of the book, she recounts her development into a quilter of the highest order.

Quilt authority Mary Elizabeth Johnson Huff writes, “Although the story itself is heartbreaking in many passages, the text is highly readable and flows so smoothly that the reader doesn’t want to put the book down. It is a welcome addition to the literature of women’s lives in the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first century. Unfortunately, Bettye’s early childhood and troubled marriage are not unique: what is unique is that she found redemption through art.”