I Think I've Turned a Corner!

Yesterday I felt like I had sort of "turned a corner", or at least a little corner. I did go upstairs to my sewing room and start organizing things I got from my mother's house that I wanted for my sewing room and cleaning up in there so I can get started with my hobby again. I had a lot of things to wash and the denim quilt above was one thing I washed and put it outside on my screened-in porch to air dry.

After my mother died and my brother and two sisters and I started talking about the things we wanted to keep of hers, the quilt pictured above was the first thing that came to my mind. This quilt is about 45 years old. I really didn't know what kind of shape it was in or even if it was finished but it is finished. There are places that have worn or frayed or stitches have come loose, etc. and it is very primitive in design but the reason I love this old quilt and wanted it so badly is because of the good memories it brings to me.

I think I was about 15 years old when my mother and I worked on this quilt together. It was her idea. She just wanted to cut up old jeans of ours into these little squares and do some sort of design on each square, then join them together into a quilt. I hadn't done any kind of sewing much at that time. I did take what they called home economics in high school and hated it but I think this was after we worked on this quilt. My mother at that time owned a Merle Norman Cosmetics store and we would work on this quilt there when times were slack. I just have such fond memories of doing this with my mother. Then she put it together. I think she must have zigzagged around each square and then crocheted them all together. I don't know when she had time to do this because she worked all day and had four children at the time, the youngest being probably around two years old. She was just amazing at the things she accomplished!

Here's a close-up of one of the squares that I did. You can see how childish my stitches were but I was so proud of those stitches and that design. We made up all of our designs. We didn't have a pattern of any kind. This was all made up in our minds and we just used whatever scraps of materials that we could find. I remember my mother praising everything that I did. She was building self esteem and love of sewing with me as well as a bond.

Here's one of her blocks. There is one little place by the 3 on the right that's frayed from just age but you can see the difference in her stitches and mine above. I wonder how she chose the time, 3 o'clock? Maybe because that's when I got out of school and rode the school bus to her place of business every afternoon to help her until closing time? This quilt is full of memories and I love it.