RANGELEY – “Can’t sew without a thimble!” Tinker Dunham laughs as she puts the finishing touches on a new quilt made from old quilt pieces for the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum that goes on display on Saturday, July 19, at the Knit, Crochet and Craft Show and Sale, from 9 a.m.to 3 p.m. at the museum building on Route 16, one mile east of Rangeley.

Winona Davenport of Phillips had given the museum 16 irregularly shaped rectangles of strips of cloth pieced together by her aunt, Rose Huntoon. Colorful pieces of cloth from the 1930s, some cut from feed bags, were stitched carefully by Huntoon, but she never got the chance to sew the quilt together in her lifetime.

Dunham took up the challenge last winter: “The hardest part about it was deciding where to put the pieces and, especially, how to cut the pieces down to size. One end of the quilt square would be wider than the other, and the pieces were all different sizes. Often, I’d take the smallest square and make the others fit to it.”

But plenty of inspiration had prepared Dunham for the work on the Huntoon quilt since both of her grandmothers quilted. Though they died before she could learn from them, Dunham treasures the quilts of Minnie Fancourt of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Minnie Spiller of Rangeley. “Minnie Fancourt had a quilt with pieces of different sizes, just like this quilt,” Dunham remembers. And Spiller kept a boarding house in Rangeley, in the building that is just west of Stone’s Throw Eatery, and she used her quilts on the beds. One of her quilts hangs today on a room in Tinker Dunham’s home.

Dunham has been quilting since 1977 when she took lessons in Rangeley from Penny Webb. “The rest,” she explains, “I taught myself. I just like to quilt. Putting the little pieces together, seeing the colors and how they come out. I like the way it looks when you’re done.”

Her love for quilting shows in the quilts she’s made for herself and her husband, Bill, her daughter, Jennifer; her son, Kent; and her grandchildren, Lauren, Danielle and Matthew. And she’s teaching the next generation. She helped her niece, Karen, make a quilt for her mother and for her and her husband, Hank Yankowsky, when they married.

“I’ve always got a dozen projects going,” Dunham smiles. “And, I have a new hobby, rug hooking.”

The logging museum opens from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays and holds its 23rd annual logging festival on July 25 and 26. For more information, call 864-5595.