No time on my hands,
Grace McCance Snyder
Hardcover
(Caxton Printers, March 15, 1963)
When Grace Snyder, the matriarch of a pioneer Nebraska family, wrote these reminiscences in her eightieth year, she felt she had been blessed by having no time on my hands. The story of her busy life begins on the high plains of Nebraska, where her parents homesteaded in 1885. She recalls her childhood in a sod house on a frontier that required everyone to pull together in the face of hostile weather, serious illness, and economic depression but that also held its full share of good times. As a child of seven and up, writes Grace Snyder, . . . I wished that I might grow up to make the most beautiful quilts in the world, to marry a cowboy, and to look down on the top of a cloud. At the time I dreamed those dreams and wished those wishes, it seemed impossible that any of them could every come true. But she saw all of them realized. No Time on My Hands is a remarkable chronicle of the sod house era and of Grace Snyders married life on a ranch in Nebraskas sandhills. From there she finally flies above the clouds to exhibits where her quilts contribute to a worldwide revival of quiltmaking.