This post actually came out of something I wrote for my Etsy Monday series on Small Town Shopaholic. I really liked the subject and wanted to continue my thoughts a little, so copied and pasted in this blog.
It’s about quilts. I am a sucker for quilts. I come by it honestly. The women in my family (up until I came along with my disgusting lacking of sewing machine talent) were quilters.
I have memories of being on my grandma’s back porch while a group of women worked together around a quilting frame. I have quilts that have been handed down over decades, that have been washed until they are falling apart, that were made with scraps of clothes. I love them. Wrapping up in them on a cold winter evening is like wrapping a bit of my family around me.
One of my favorite tattered old quilts is one that has several names written on it on laundry pen. Everyone who was around on the day it was finished in 1969 signed their name. There is a signature on it, Connie. That’s my mom. My dad was in Vietnam in ‘69 and she was living with her folks, waiting for him to return. While she was there she passed time working on that quilt.
When I got married and we moved to Sacramento, I took that quilt with me because it smelled like my mom’s linen closet. When I wrap it around me I am instantly home.
My real love, though, is a pink patchwork baby quilt that was hand stitched by my Great Grandmother Annabelle. They called her Granny Tosh, but I don’t really remember because she died while I was still in diapers.
The little quilt that she made me was sort of my woobie. I would wrap up in it until it was too small for me, and my bony little legs would poke out the end of it. Finally, when I was a teenager, my mom packed it safely away with some other baby blankets in our attic.
Pink blankie came out of retirement when I started having babies of my own. We opened the box of baby blankets and I brought home the ones that were sewn and crocheted for me, now to be wrapped around my little ones. And I do pull it out for kids sometimes, or cover them with it when they fall asleep on the couch. But I won’t let them drag it around outside or take it to preschool the way they do with some of the countless other blankets that we have around the house. I love it too much and worry that it would get lost or ruined.
Because quilts are special. They are not just fabric and thread. They carry with them the story of the person who stitched the blocks together or hand tied the fabric with yarn. If lost, a quilt can’t be replaced by a blanket purchased at Bed Bath and Beyond.
Cheesy, I know. And some of you won’t get this, or agree, or care. But I challenge you to find something more cozy and comfy than sitting deep in your couch on a cold winter afternoon, wrapped up in a quilt your grandma gave you, drinking coffee and Bailey’s, watching the fireplace (or TV).
Can’t do it.
Filed under: Blissfully Random Thoughts
Not cheesy at all, actually.
I’ve always loved quilts, too, but the past few years have seriously tested the depth and duration of my affection: because now, my mother-in-law quilts. Prolifically. And with a different (oh, how to put this?) sense of style than I might have personally chosen.
So now we have stacks of quilts in every room of the house, some of which I genuinely like and regularly use, but others… oh, dear. OH, DEAR.
Sigh.