This has been kind of an unhappy week in a number of ways, so I thought I'd finish it off with something that makes me happy.

I don't think I shared this before.



This is a quilt (well, most of it - the bottom row or two wouldn't fit in the photo) that my mom made for me.

It is alternating squares of a simple square-in-square block (most of them were blocks left over from a quilt my mother and HER mother made...and some of the fabrics in there, like the daisy-print-on-black in the lower left corner, are ones I remember my mom having clothes from when I was a kid). The alternate blocks are drawings I did of animals. I loved to draw animals when I was a kid (I think we started this quilt when I was maybe 6) and was very fond of the Ed Emberley drawing books (anyone else remember those?) I had the animal book and a lot of my animals are Emberley-style.

Here are a couple sections of the quilt, showing some of the fabrics (I think most of them are 1960s-70s vintage) and a couple of my favorite drawings.



A funny green beetle I drew. I think this is my favorite of my animal drawings on the quilt now. (I was probably 7 when I drew this).



This is right next to the beetle but shows a few other of the parts of the quilt. The rabbit is, I think, supposed to be Thumper. And the mouse - if you can read the caption on the top of the block I helpfully placed there - is Bernard (from the Miss Bianca books and the Disney movie "The Rescuers." I was very fond of the Miss Bianca books when I was a child; I had a box set of all five of the books and I think I read them several times).

You can also see the two "special" blocks my mom made for the quilt. One has my first initial on it and commemorates my 7th birthday, the other is from Valentine's day of that year.

We started setting the quilt together and my mom originally was going to quilt it in pieces (like the original Lap Quilting method). But we got busy, time and other projects intervened, and it never got finished.

I grew up and forgot about the quilt. I guess at some point I assumed it either got lost in one of the periodic basement floods we had, or something had happened to it.

My mom found the pieces again a few years ago (Well, I think she had them tucked away and never totally forgot them). She set them together and added the wide red border (which is actually leftover fabric from the "Chimney Sweep" quilt I have in the frame right now...I had pieced the quilt when I was home visiting them that summer and left my leftovers there). She and the quilting group at her church quilted it and she gave it to me a couple of years ago at Thanksgiving.

The funny thing is, I'm kind of glad this never got finished when I was a kid...as a kid, I was kind of hard on stuff (I was sort of a tomboy) and I could see the quilt having got marked up from me sitting in bed doing homework with a ballpoint pen, or it getting faded in the sun. Now that I'm an adult and know the kind of work that goes into these things, I can care for it properly.

And yes, I do use it (carefully!) on my bed sometimes. Not for very long - I might put it on for a month and then rotate it off. But I do like having it and it makes me happy to look at it. Because it contains a lot of memories - memories of the kid I used to be (I haven't just sat down and drawn for fun in years), memories of doing projects with my mom. And memories of the clothes she wore - as I said, patches in the quilt came from scraps from some of those clothes. And even memories of my grandmother, because some of the fabrics came from her and I think she pieced some of the square-in-square blocks.

It's good to have things like this.