From the time she was 12 years old (when her mother’s friend taught her to sew), Nancy Bowen’s life has been measured in stitches. Once a way to make school clothes inexpensively for herself and her sister, Nancy’s sewing ability has blossomed into much more. After retiring from a career as a public-school teacher and counselor, she had more time to sew. Today, she uses her skill and artistry to bring joy to people who need it most.

When Nancy was born, her brother Bill was five; twins Daniel and Denise were one year old. Their father was a member of the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Carraway family lived in Florida, New Jersey, Louisiana and Texas. Money was tight, so when Nancy and Denise were students at La Marque High School, they each got an allowance of just $50 per year for school clothes and shoes. Girls of that era were not allowed to wear pants to school, but Nancy was able to stretch the money by making five dresses for each of them. “We could not have bought 10 dresses,” she says.

Nancy always seemed to have a knack for sewing. She recalls the day her home economics teacher objected when Nancy taught her classmates an easy way to put in a zipper. “My teacher said, “You sew beautifully, and I know you know how to do it, but please let me do it my way.’ I would have been sewing for five or six years then,” Nancy says with a laugh. 

Nancy’s sister didn’t take as well to sewing. When Denise took the high school sewing class, she brought her projects home to Nancy. “She would sneak them in her backpack,” Nancy says. “Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I completed them at home, and she took them back in for a grade.”

Life’s zigzag stitch

In 1983, Nancy had been a single mother for several years, struggling to provide for her two children (Clint and Misti) by working three jobs. That year, however, she met Bill Bowen at a church singles event, and her life took a happy turn. After they were married, they moved to Cameron, Texas, and Nancy began to look for a job. “I was either under-qualified or over-qualified,” she says. “Then Bill asked, ‘Why don’t you go back to school?’” Nancy soon enrolled in classes at Temple Junior College and later graduated from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, becoming certified to teach history, business classes, and vocational education. “I didn’t start teaching until I was 40,” she says.

Nancy was pregnant with her daughter Bethany when she earned her degree, but that did not stop her. She began taking graduate courses at night and eventually earned her master’s degree, becoming qualified as a school counselor. “I could have taken three more classes to be a licensed professional counselor, but that’s not who I wanted to reach. I wanted to reach the kids in the school,” she says. “When I was in high school, the counselors only had time to help the college-bound students.”

Nancy worked in Cameron schools for 19 years, first as a teacher and later as a high school counselor. She finished her career as a junior high counselor in Tomball. Always observant of her students’ needs, she kept a stash of food, socks, and other needed items in her office. Students quickly learned that Nancy cared about them. 

“I wanted to build a rapport with the kids,” she says. “I had students from the very poor to the very rich.”

A new stitch; a new niche

For most of her life, Nancy sewed primarily clothes, but that changed in 2008. When she and Bill went to Fredericksburg to avoid Hurricane Ike, she found a quilt made of 3,000, one-inch squares. “It kind of gave me the bug,” she says, so she took quilting lessons. Soon she was churning out baby quilts as gifts for friends and for new mothers who received help at Pregnancy Assistance Center North. Several years ago, she was honored to make a T-shirt quilt that was raffled off at a U.S. Coast Guard Academy fundraiser ball. She dedicated the quilt to her father, who served in the Coast Guard during three wars.  The raffle winner later wrote to Nancy to compliment her craftsmanship.

A few years ago, Nancy turned her love of quilting into a business. Using her long-arm sewing machine (which is 10 feet long), she quilts other seamstresses’ piecework—a job that is impossible on a standard sewing machine. Meanwhile, she continued to construct her own quilts. She estimates that, including small baby quilts, she has created more than 100 quilts from start to finish.

Memory quilts

Twelve of Nancy’s quilts were especially meaningful, both to her and to the women for whom they were made. Several years ago, a friend showed her a unique quilt pattern that utilizes the iconic log cabin design to create a cross in the middle. Not long after, her friend Fran Johnson’s husband, Richard, passed away, and an idea was born. Nancy asked Fran for five of Richard’s shirts so that she could piece them together and create a quilt. When Nancy completed the project, Fran loved it and hung it in her home to remind her of Richard every day. As other friends and acquaintances lost their husbands, Nancy made 11 more “memory quilts.”    

Nancy is thoughtful when she approaches a widow. She doesn’t want to rush them into going through their husbands’ possessions, but neither does she want them to get rid of the shirts. So, she tells them, “When you are ready to deal with it, I will help you pick them out.” She also asks them for a favorite Bible verse to put on a panel on the back of the quilt. After cutting the shirts into pieces—the most laborious part of the process—Nancy pieces them together on one of her two Bernina sewing machines, and finally quilts them on her long-arm machine. She uses a digitally-downloaded pattern that features crosses, clouds and doves. “I am not smart,” she says. “The machine is smart.”

Nancy notes that the quilting alone—not including the cutting and piecing—takes hours. “It takes 20 minutes to quilt a row, and that’s with it being automatic,” she says, “and there are 16 rows.” Nancy, however, doesn’t keep up with the hours it takes to create a memory quilt. “I just get such a blessing from doing it. I don’t consider it work.”

It is emotional when Nancy presents a completed quilt to a recipient. “There are lots of tears, not only from the widow, but from me,” she says. “I have not had the easiest life, but nobody does. God picked me up every time. This is something I can do for God and for that person who is hurting so badly. This is something I can do that maybe somebody else can’t. God gave me an opportunity to bless somebody. This is my ministry.”

Word has gotten around that Nancy is a gifted seamstress. She is a longtime member of West Conroe Baptist Church, which holds a city-wide mission event every summer called Cross Conroe. A few years ago, the church created a sewing team, and Nancy became the coordinator, coaching the church’s seamstresses to construct drawstring backpacks for homeless people. The “blessing bags” are filled with water, snacks, socks and other needed items. At Cross Conroe 2022 alone, the sewing team constructed 150 bags.

Nancy’s sewing has overtaken two rooms of her home, but it seems only appropriate for someone who has spent so much of her life sewing for others. 

“There are very few days I don’t sew,” she says. “I’ve never lost my love of taking a flat piece of material and making something out of it.”

For more information, email Nancy at nancybowen51@gmail.com.