Today we will lay my maternal grandmother to rest. She died last December, during one of her beloved snowstorms in Harbor Springs, MI. There is a lot I could say about my grandmother, but this post will focus on her influence in my life with regards to fiber arts.
The women in my mother’s family have a long history of textile crafts, mostly sewing, quilting and crochet. I inherited both my name and much of my interest in craft from my Grandma Jo.
I say interest because my grandmother was not the one who taught me most of what I know; she lived in Northern Michigan, a good ways away from our home in Maryland. But I was surrounded by my grandmother’s creations and inspired by them from birth.
My baby blanket was made by my grandmother from satin sheets which were too hot and too slippery for her. It’s origin story was told over and over. My mother would begin the story with the shortcomings of the sheets and end with “and if Grandma kept slipping out of bed, why did she think it would be a good baby blanket? I almost dropped you!” While the story was told for it’s humor, it also provided an early lesson that one thing could be transformed into another thing. I still have it, though it now lives carefully folded away in our cedar chest. It’s thread bare and now more a dusty peach color than the original petal pink.
When I was four or five, I outgrew my favorite peach sundress. I was devastated. Why didn’t clothing get bigger with me? My grandmother looked at it, and told me we could make another one. She and I picked out fabric, and she dived into her button tin and we picked out little painted porcelain buttons, which my grandmother carefully explained were very old: antiques. I found the mix of new and old fascinating. I’d get a new dress and it would be even better than the one I outgrew. Magic.
My siblings and I also slept each night under quilts made by my grandmother, which are now long gone, too worn out but not quite precious enough to keep. Sometimes, when you have so many treasures, you do have to learn to let go of some of them. I do still have the quilt my grandmother made for me when I went to college. Interspersed among the many different colored squares are bits of fabric my sister collected on the sly from the scraps of things I’d sewn throughout highschool: the red wool from my cape, printed cottons from my Rennaisance dresses, the rayon from my night gown and more. Some of the clothing is gone, but the memories are sewn in with the scraps that went into the quilt.
And bonus fluffy kitty picture:
While my mother worked hard to foster my interest in sewing, it was my grandmother I wanted to impress when I finally did pick it up. When she told me I couldn’t possibly make a skirt because the pattern was too hard, I just saw this as a challenge and smuggly showed it off the next summer I visted her.
My mother and grandmother were both crafters but their approaches were different. My mother was interested in quick results and as a result took shortcuts and a more spontaneous approach. If it looked good to an external viewer, she was happy. This approach served well in turning out Halloween and school play costumes, but perhaps explains why she never got far with quilting.
My grandmother was careful, deliberate, meticulous. Something should look well made at all levels – not just from a poorly lit doorway or out in the audience. It was with shock that I watched her declare that one of my early sewing projects “could be better” as she turned it inside out and inspected the seams. My mother was just happy I had sewn something that fit and met her ideas of suffciently modest for a teenage girl. For a while I only allowed my grandmother the pleasure of viewing my projects as I modeled them.
Her meticulousness, as well as her eye for design, served her well in creating elegant, carefully crafted and classic quilts. In 2016, her completely hand-pieced and hand-quilted quilt won a blue ribbon in the Emmet Charlevoix County Fair. She was immensely (and deservedly) proud of that quilt. It was the only thing she had made which she kept with her in her final years in a nursing home, complete with it’s blue ribbon.
Somewhere along the way, my grandmothers’ confidence in my skills grew such that when I told her I’d be making my own wedding dress, using the one she and her mother made for her first wedding as the model, she didn’t batt an eye or tell me it was too much work (she did tell me her wedding dress, on the left, only fit me because it was “let out” for her younger sister – can’t have it all). I think coming to my wedding may have been the last real travel she did, and I was so thankful she was able to be there.
It has been hard to be in Germany, knowing my grandmother is gone. During my times in France, first as an undergrad for study abroad, and then as an English language assistant after college, she was the one I called most to talk about my travels and experiences. I have pieces of her jewelry with me, but aside from a few crochet hooks and a couple sewing accessories, most of her craft things are locked up in storage. The quilts she made, her sewing machine and sewing table, the crocheted doilies, all of this remains behind, waiting for when we come home. But she won’t be there.
Grandma, you will be sorely missed (and today you aren’t allowed to complain that I’m wearing too much black).