Hand-painted peach quilt showing at Blue Pig Gallery | Western Colorado

When $200 was the top bid on her quilt at a silent auction, Flora Anderson bundled it up and took it back home.

“She was so mad,” said her daughter, Robin McCain.

The quilt featured 90 peach varieties, hand painted on its squares. Each was unique in its depiction and coloring and labeled with its name: Cresthaven, PF 15A, Red Globe, Standard Elberta.

“This is something that should be in a museum somewhere,” Anderson told her daughter. “Maybe I should donate it.”

McCain and her sister, Lori Bennett, recently honored their mother’s wish and donated her peach quilt to the Palisade Historical Society and its Palisade History Museum, 3740 G Road.

The large quilt is being displayed through the month of August at the Blue Pig Gallery, 101 W. Third St., in downtown Palisade.

“I got to go see it when it first was hung up. It really almost teared me up,” said Bennett, who lives in Glenwood Springs.

“She’s in heaven so ecstatic!” she said about her mother.

Anderson, who was 80 when she finished the quilt, died in 2020 at the age of 98.

She spent at least 300 hours painting the peaches on squares for the quilt, but that might be a low time estimate, McCain said.

Sometimes she would paint a peach variety two or three times before she was happy. “She was a perfectionist,” McCain said.

For a year or longer, when her daughters would visit, Anderson would lay out her latest squares for them to see. “It was painstakingly done,” Bennett said.

While Anderson was creative, constantly sewing, crocheting, crafting or baking cookies to keep her hand busy, painting was not something McCain and Bennett remember their mother doing much of until she started the quilt.

Anderson grew up on a beet farm in eastern Colorado. She lived through the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression and joined the WAVES, the women’s branch of the US Naval Reserve, during World War II, Bennett said.

Anderson then became a teacher and a mother and landed in Glenwood Springs when her husband moved there for his position with Colorado Mountain College, Bennett said.

Her parents moved to Grand Junction in 2000, and her mother “just got really enthralled with peaches,” Bennett said.

McCain, who lives in the Grand Valley, would go with her mother to her favorite fruit stands after her father died. At one of them, McCain can’t remember which one, Anderson talked at length with a grower about the valley’s peaches.

“She really picked his brain and he gave her a book that described all the different peaches,” McCain said.

Anderson put what she learned to use with textile paints and created her quilt for a silent auction at her church. But when that didn’t go as she hoped, she took the quilt home.

After Anderson died in 2020, the quilt was forgotten for a while, only to be rediscovered in a plastic bag in a garage. That was when the sisters approached the historical society.

“I am amazed at the different number of peach varieties,” said JoAnn Rasmussen, chair of the society.

“And they’re accurate,” said Priscilla Walker, vice chair of the society.

Rasmussen, Walker and the sisters all expressed appreciation that the owners of the Blue Pig, Heather and Chuck Nowak, were willing to display the quilt during peach season, including during the Palisade Peach Festival, Aug. 16–17.

“I just want people to see it and be able to appreciate it,” McCain said. “Her (Anderson’s) heart is so happy right now.”