Another story about the fire

We went to Cairo this weekend for my niece's birthday and to deliver a quilt and two fleece cheater afghans (the ones you tie together on the edges instead of sew) that Sheila just loves. I made her a couple along the way for Christmases and she'd mentioned missing them. So those were easy to make, and this actually was, too, out of blocks from who knows where I found at the bottom of the cedar chest. I wish I'd taken a better photo of it, but this is it finished, and below are some pictures from the process. The thing took me 3 days because the 42 blocks were already put together by some farmer's wife in the 40s. The whole thing is stripes and plaids and little floral calicoes, done by hand more precisely than I would ever have the patience to accomplish. So maybe that's why I picked it up. But really, I don't know why else I would have bothered--it's a simple set of blocks in colors I don't go for, in a pattern I could do in my sleep. But there they were at the bottom of the cedar chest waiting for Sheila.

I know there's a smudge here in the bottom right. It has since been cleaned off my lens. Thanks, Leo. Here below is a photo of the back--I always piece my backs because they are more interesting than a field of white. On this one I used a spare block from the front, some washed out calicoes, and some rice sacks from our local CSA. The illusion of age.Sheila cried and I cried and it was good. I didn't tell her, because I got all verklempt, but it's a variation on a simple pattern called Broken Dishes. And I quilted it in a pattern similar to the log cabin setting called Barn Raising. Sometimes in my quilts there are things only I know. And I kind of like that. The prayer inside the work.

We came home today and got ready for school to start tomorrow. But then my mother-in-law sent me a note this evening. Basically, she and her youngest sister stayed behind after dinner today and went through some things--the fire has sparked, so to speak, a desire to have everything sorted and accounted for in many households. Mary Helen, my mother-in-law, as the oldest daughter, has a bunch of boxes of stuff from her parents' house, and when her older brother Tom died, she inherited the stuff that nobody else had claim to. She and Peggy were going to go through some things to see what could simply be gotten rid of, what should be split up, what should be kept, and so forth.

There was this box behind other boxes they sorted through. Mary Helen knew she'd gone through it before but she opened it anyway. On top was what she remembered, some birth certificates and marriage license and photos and stuff. And on the bottom of this under all the stuff was an envelope. Inside the envelope was a complete duplicate set of her dad's medals from World War II and a bunch of stuff they'd assumed burned up in the fire--some of it had, but here were duplicates, and other stuff had been safe in Mary Helen's bedroom the whole time.