It's Grandma Style

I realized something this morning. I was looking at an old photo I have of my maternal grandma and two aunts (probably taken before I was born, I'm guessing it was from the early 60s based on the apparent ages of the people in the photo and the styles of clothing)

My grandma is wearing glasses. She always wore glasses, as long as I knew her (and even before, obviously).

Well, in this photo, the glasses she is wearing are not at all unlike my new ones in style: not-quite cat's eye shape, dark uppers, rimless lowers, similar shape.

That made me smile. I wonder if part of the reason I liked the frames and chose them was some subliminal memory (she did wear, as far as I can remember, a very similar pair for a time when I was a kid). I don't think it's simply, "I look like her so the same style of frames look good on me" because I take far more after my dad's side of the family- I don't look that much (at least I think) like my maternal grandmother.

I know some women would be aghast to realize they had picked frames "like grandma's" but I'm actually kind of pleased. Both my grandmas were good women. I knew my maternal grandma better (she lived longer into my young adulthood) and she was a tough, strong, and capable woman. She got married at 17 to a man twice her age. (Later on, one of her daughters asked her why - not only was he that much older, but she didn't know him nearly as well as some of the boys from her school. Her response was something like, "He was a good man and I wanted to get off the farm." In fact, she was pretty heavily worked - from the stories I've heard - on her parents' farm, and marriage was probably an improvement, if nothing else, she had more of a say in things.) And Grandpa apparently wasn't that handy but he was one of those men who didn't feel threatened by the fact that his wife could do carpentry work better than he could - he realized he had other skills (he worked as a bookkeeper in lumber camps). Grandma also did lots of other things - she was an excellent bread baker (the story is whenever she volunteered to make bread for a church bake sale, it was sold before she even brought the loaves to church). She did a lot of sewing for her kids, in fact, someone once stopped her and my mother on the street (when my mother was a child) and asked where she had bought my mother's outfit - and it turned out Grandma had cut it down from an old suit and sewn it herself.

She also knitted and crocheted but I got the feeling she knit out of obligation (her family needed mittens and hats) but she crocheted for enjoyment - she did a lot of filet work, something I've never been very good at.

I'm happy in that I can knit for enjoyment; I have enough hats and mittens, and I can even do things like do a little knitting for charity. And I don't do thread crochet, but I do make critters out of it (Yarn for both Filly Trixie and Discord have been obtained....) And I sew...when I get a moment and have the right foundation garments on I'm going to take a photo of myself in the really cool dress I made over break. (I think it's the best dress, in terms of both technical ability and fit, that I've ever made)

One of the things I like and celebrate about my grandmothers is that they were both capable women with lots of different skills, and that they generally were not the sort of person to shut down when difficulty arises.