The first time I remember talking to Elizabeth Mahonske we were gazing at her kitchen floor in Blossburg. I was mesmerized.

I was sixteen years old (her son Adam was a buddy of my first official boyfriend), and Elizabeth was showing me the wooden tile floor she had just installed. Not had someone else install, but installed with her own hands, of inch-thick end-cut blocks—there must have been a thousand at our feet—made for her by Tycov Bolter in Covington (then known for the ash bolts they cut for baseball bats, now the home of Ron Baltzley Hardwoods).

I was also moved by her fortitude and her spirit. She was fifty-nine years old, and still melancholy about the untimely loss of her husband a few years earlier. Born in 1914, Elizabeth had dreamed of studying architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, an insupportable aspiration to her father, given the era. After years of designing and sewing clothing to buttress the family finances, her husband’s illness had forced her into the role of breadwinner, and she would work for thirteen years as a cataloger at Mansfield University.

But Elizabeth’s creativity was uncontainable, and, at seventy-five, she was inspired by a book she read on quilting. The beautiful product of that fascination will be on display at the Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center on Main Street in Wellsboro, opening with a reception from 2 to 4 p.m. on July 12 and running through August 3. In the fifteen years Elizabeth had before her eyesight failed too drastically for close work at age ninety, she hand stitched on two small quilting hoops—ten stitches to the inch—seven quilts, each one taking about nine months. They will all hang at the Gmeiner with her smaller quilted pieces.

Row Houses was quilted for the stairway of Adam’s home in Baltimore, and gallery patrons can distinguish Adam’s pale pink house with the red door by the little cats (they had eight at the time!) stitched into the windows. Indian Headdress is the largest and most dramatic of the seven and held a special place in her heart. Elizabeth’s Canadian mother was thought to have some Native American heritage, and the quilt is an homage to that Cherokee bloodline. School House is another display quilt, but the balance of the work, geometric or paisley-bordered, and painstakingly hand sewn, were meant to be used.

My relationship with Elizabeth didn’t really start until I came back home decades later. How inspiring it was to know a woman in her nineties keen on holding elegant dinner parties (often punctuated by her sublime chocolate ganache-draped hazelnut cake). When she was 100 years old and discharged from the hospital from some nagging centenarian health issues, she designed a more modest hospital gown—something that wasn’t always falling off shoulders and exposing derrieres. Her prototype didn’t get very far, for cost reasons, but the gown she stitched up looked as comfortable as it was fashionable and discreet.

Elizabeth was as gritty as she was elegant, as feisty as she was serene. She thought Ralph Nader had the best ideas for the country, and when she met him at an event where he autographed Unsafe at Any Speed for her, Adam reports that they talked like old friends for half an hour. She died at 101, full until the end of an artistic lifeforce, and it is no end of delightful that gallery-goers will get a glimpse of that.