AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — The First Lutheran Ladies’ Aid put its quilt on a frame in the church basement the second week of January and took it off the second week of July, and on Wednesday it took champion in the quilt division, and on Thursday afternoon the fair received word that it had been selected for exhibition display at the State Fair.

It is called “Chain of Lakes.” It is seven feet by nine, pieced in blues and greens with a cream ground, and its design — worked out over three meetings and one disagreement that Irene Bergum describes as “fully resolved” — lays out the seven lakes in their actual relative positions, with the channels between them pieced as narrow bands. Big Pelican is the largest block. Mud Lake, at the bottom left, is small, spring-fed blue, and, per Bergum, “exactly the right size, which we checked on a map, because we knew somebody would ask.”

Seven women worked on it: Bergum, Mildred Haugen, Janet Vekved, Donna Skoglund, Gladys Sandbo, Verna Tho, and Eunice Dahlquist, who put in the fewest hours and says so before anyone else can. The hand-quilting alone — all of it done at the frame, none of it machine — accounts for something over four hundred hours by the Aid’s own log, which is kept in a spiral notebook and is not up for discussion.

The last Misquah quilt to be selected for state display was in 1994, made by a group that included Lorraine Vekved, who played the organ at First Lutheran for fifty-one years and who died in June, and whose name is on the log in the same notebook. Janet Vekved, her great-niece by marriage, worked the frame this winter in a chair that the Aid reports was Lorraine’s chair, which nobody arranged and nobody mentioned at the time.

The quilt goes down Wednesday and hangs for the run of the fair. It comes back to the church basement in September, where it will be raffled in November, as they always are, for the roof fund, which is in year fourteen.