Hearth & Home Stories

Thirty years of work, cleared for nine parking spaces. Edith Pelletier (72) has until October to empty a workshop she’s rented for thirty years — the last of her handmade cat baskets are going at 55% off.

Edith Pelletier, 72, in the corner shop in Putney, Vermont she has rented and quilted in for thirty years. It comes down in October.

The short version: „I’m not closing. I’m being closed.“ The bank on the corner in Putney, Vermont has bought the building beside it — the one Edith Pelletier has rented and quilted in for thirty years. The site plan filed with the town shows nine parking spaces and a landscaped island. The crew comes at the start of October. Inside are a little over four hundred cat baskets — most of them finished across her last winter at the machine, and a handful she made for herself years ago and never intended to sell. All of it is going out at 55% off , because there is nowhere left to keep it.

Half the shop is in boxes already. The cast-iron seam roller her grandmother brought down from Quebec is wrapped in a dish towel by the door. Three decades of cotton — saffron, plum, charcoal, burnt orange — is coming off the back wall a bolt at a time.

The last things she made in there weren’t quilts. They were baskets.

„I worked on them all winter,“ she says. „Small stitching tires my eyes out after a couple of hours, and a basket is big, forgiving work. It was never the plan for them to be the last thing. That’s just how it landed.“

The letter came in February, on bank stationery. The corner had changed hands in the fall — her building, the lot behind it, all of it. The branch needs a drive-up lane and somewhere for customers to leave their cars. Her lease runs out on September 30th.

„Nine spaces,“ she says. „That’s what it comes to. Nine spaces and a bit of shrubbery, and thirty years has to come out of that building to make room for them.“

The bays are already marked out. The orange lines cross the lot, run up to the wall of Edith’s building, and stop there.

She argued it. She wrote to the regional office twice and got the same paragraph back both times. She stood up at the March town meeting and said her piece in front of forty of her neighbors. What she asked for in the end was small: one more winter in the building, and she would go quietly in the spring.

„The contractor is booked for October. That was the answer,“ she says. „Everyone was perfectly nice to me. Nice, and then no. Every single time. To them the building is a square on a site plan. Not one of the people who drew it has ever made a thing with their hands.“

You can’t quilt in a building that isn’t there anymore. And I’m seventy-two — the right thumb quits on me after about four hours these days. It didn’t use to. If I’m honest, this was coming. The bank only put a date on it.

— Edith Pelletier, 72

Early August in Putney. The shop smells of cotton, cedar and a woodstove she won’t be lighting this year. Along the side wall the baskets are stacked four rows deep — every one quilted through, every one carrying a design of its own. Junebug, the calico, is asleep on top of the third row, where she has been since about eight this morning.

„I made these because I felt like making them,“ she says. „They can’t come with me. Somebody ought to be using them.“

In thirty years, no amount of money would have bought one. She never made them to sell. This is the first time they have been available to anyone outside her own kitchen table — and it is the last.

Sixty-five years, one machine, and a shelf of baskets she never meant to part with

Edith won’t call herself a craftswoman. She was a librarian — thirty-four years cataloging at the Putney Public Library, retired in 2018. The sewing is older than the job, and it outlasted it.

Marguerite Pelletier came down to Vermont from Trois-Rivières in 1923, seven years old and without a word of English. What came with her, besides her mother and a wooden trunk, was courtepointe — the Quebec way of quilting. Wool out of dead coats. Cotton off flour sacks. One brass thimble.

There is a photograph on the shop wall: a girl of eight on a back porch in the summer of 1961, cloth across her knees.

„She put it in my hands and told me — you finish what you start, Edith, even if it takes you all summer. It did take me all summer. What I made was terrible. She hung it up in her hallway anyway.“

Sixty-five years of evenings and Saturdays followed. Library school. Two children, Claire and Marc. Forty-one years married to Raymond, and then the morning in 2017 when a heart attack took him.

„I kept sewing after Raymond went. Cloth doesn’t ask you how you’re holding up. That was worth a great deal that year.“

The brass thimble is still on her right hand every morning.

It saw my grandmother out. It’ll likely see me out as well. That’s how you know a thing was made properly.

— Edith Pelletier, on her grandmother’s thimble

Edith at the machine, running the quilting pattern around a basket panel. The brass thimble on her right hand crossed the border from Quebec in 1923 and was handed down to her in the summer of 1961.

The baskets started about thirty years ago — one here, one there, for people she knew. Somewhere near nine hundred of them by her own reckoning. Every one built start to finish by her. Not one ever sold.

It began with a stranger at the Windham County fair. Edith had quilts and table runners laid out, nothing else. The woman asked whether she had ever made anything for a laundry room.

„She told me her hamper was the single ugliest object in her house,“ Edith says. „What she wanted was something that looked like it belonged where it stood.“

Edith sewed one that week. When the woman came by to collect it, she stopped in the doorway and said nothing for a moment.

„Then she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to put laundry in it. Too pretty to shove in a corner, is how she put it. I’ve been turning that sentence over for thirty years.“

She never carried a finished basket to a fair table. They went out quietly — to neighbors, to her own children and grandchildren, to whoever admired one hard enough to leave with it under an arm.

„People passed the word along, the way they do around here. I never advertised a thing in my life. They found their own way out the door.“

Until this year.

What’s different about them

The cats are why people stop. The way they’re built is why they keep them.

A heavy cotton-poly face goes around a firm batted core, and the whole thing runs through the machine in Edith’s quilting pattern — right the way around the outside, not just across the panel you happen to be looking at. That is where the weight comes from. You notice it the moment you pick one up.

Seven designs, all of them from the final run. Each one quilted from the ground up, each cat cut and sewn on by hand.

Nothing on the surface is printed. Every ear, tail, eye and whisker is a piece of cloth she cut, laid down and stitched into place herself. The shapes stand slightly proud of the ground behind them. Drag a thumb across one and you can feel where each cat begins and ends.

„They won’t crack, peel or wash off,“ Edith says. „They’re sewn into the cloth — they’re part of it. Sixty-five years on and my hands still do it while I’m thinking about something else entirely.“

It stands up straight in the corner on its own — empty or full. No wire ring. No plastic frame. The quilted walls are doing the work.

— Edith Pelletier, on how they hold their shape

That part matters more than any of the rest of it. The usual fabric basket gives up the second you take the laundry out — handles falling inward, sides caving, a sad heap in the corner. Edith’s don’t. At sixteen inches across and twenty tall, one holds a week of laundry and still stands when there’s nothing in it. The handles are doubled canvas, bartacked wherever the weight pulls. And when a cat gets to it first — and one will — the whole thing goes in the machine on a cool gentle cycle.

The one she kept

There is one basket in the stack that was never meant to leave.

„Reading Cat — the ginger one on the books. That’s Ambrose,“ she says. „Thirty-four years I put books on shelves for a living, and then I retire and end up with a cat who sits on every single one I open.“

She quilted it four winters ago for her own reading chair, and that is where it has stood since.

„It goes with the rest of them. No sense hanging on to one basket.“

One of them has held the same corner for eight years

Edith doesn’t keep many records, but she remembers the people. There’s a friend two streets over who was given one years ago.

„Started off as her laundry. Now it’s her knitting and her good quilts and whatever the grandchildren leave behind. Eight years on and it’s the hardest-working thing in that house. Everyone who walks in asks about it. She’s the one who talked me into letting them out at all.“

„That’s all I ever wanted for them,“ Edith says. „Not a thing you tuck away because it’s too pretty to touch. Something you keep out because it works.“

The handwork up close: each shape cut, layered and sewn onto the quilted ground. Run a thumb across and you feel every one.

What’s in the shop is all there is

The final collection exists because of nine parking spaces.

At seventy-two, Edith moves up to Burlington at the end of October. Claire has had a room waiting the best part of two years. There is no room in it for the machine, the bolts or the frame.

„Some things you carry with you. Some things you hand on.“

There is a second reason, and she gets to it more slowly.

„There’s nobody after me. Claire’s a nurse, Marc is up in Montreal, and not one of the grandchildren wants to give ten years to learning this the way I learned it. I don’t hold it against them — it isn’t the world I learned it for. But it does mean that when that building goes, it is the end of it.“

Thirty years going into boxes. The baskets stay along the wall until they’re gone; the demolition notice is already taped to the door.

Afternoons go to packing now — patterns, spools, the photographs off the wall. What came off the machine last winter is all there will ever be. There is no apprentice, the machine is going into storage, and nobody is taking the pattern.

„Nobody’s going to spend thirty years learning to do this properly,“ she says, without any bite in it. „The quilts all found somebody in the end. I expect the baskets will as well.“

A shop over in Brattleboro once asked to sell them on her behalf at a hundred and forty-five dollars each. She turned it down — it never felt right to her. Now, with a demolition notice on the door and a date on the calendar, she has done something she avoided for thirty years: cut that figure by 55%, down to $65 a basket.

„The money isn’t the point at my age,“ she says. „I’d rather they ended up in houses that use them than in a dumpster on that corner.“

Emma (16) is the one who got them online. „I never got the hang of any of that,“ Edith says, laughing. „She had it working before I’d finished my coffee.“

What people say

Where to get one

Emma, Edith’s granddaughter, set the shop up and packs every order that leaves Marlow Market Co.

Edith’s baskets go out through Marlow Market Co. , the small online shop her granddaughter Emma (16) runs. It is the only place the real ones are. They have never been in a store and they never will be.

„Emma runs every bit of it,“ Edith says. „I wouldn’t know where to start.“

Payment and shipping: all the usual cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Orders go out within 2–3 business days. Returns are free for 90 days.

One warning. Since word got around, copies have started turning up on Amazon and the other marketplaces. They photograph identically. They are not hers. The real ones come out of Emma’s shop only — built the way Edith has built things for sixty-five years, with cloth shapes sewn on and standing proud, rather than a flat printed panel.

In short

This is the basket you won’t want to leave in the laundry room.

Which is deliberate. Edith has spent sixty-five years making things meant to be used every day and looked at while you use them. Soft enough to carry, stiff enough to stand where you put it. And every new person who comes through the room stops, leans in, and puts a hand on the cats.

Junebug has spent this summer sleeping in a different one every week. Edith gave up moving her out around June.

Thirty years she kept them to herself. These are the last ones she’ll ever make.

Thank you, Edith. 🧶

More from customers