Treasure

This Thanksgiving will be the first Thanksgiving of my life when I can't pick up the phone and call my Mamaw and ask her how to make dressing. It's the first time my phone won't ring on Thanksgiving morning and her voice be on the other end. But imagine my surprise when the mailman left a package by the front door. The package was from my dad. The only thing I asked for of my grandmother's was this jewelry box. It's nothing fancy, but I love it. I would spend hours sitting on her bed playing the music and dreaming about faraway lands and wearing kimonos and binding my feet(don't ask what I read as a child) all I knew was I wanted to be somewhere more exotic than Bartlett, TN.




This is a picture of the inside:




Here's a picture of the front and it's painted like this all the way around:





And this was the note taped to the bottom:

My daddy bought this for my Mamaw forty-eight years ago. Seeing her handwriting broke my heart.

A few weeks ago I found a letter in with some pictures that my great-grandfather wrote to my great-grandmother before they were married. The letter did not really go with the stories I had heard about him. Rumor has it my great-grandfather on my daddy's father's side was mean but he wrote a pretty sweet love letter to my soon to be great-grandmother. That was like finding hidden treasure. The sad part is I've had this letter for ages and never read it because I couldn't make out the handwriting, then I remembered my Mamaw gave it to me because my great-grandmother did a lot of handwork, applique, tatting, embroidery, she always thought I would have liked her.

On to some happy stitching talk, I made some executive decisions:

1) Once all ornaments are ornamentificated I will work on 13th Colony Bay.

2)Since I'm being so positive that 13th Colony Bay will be finished before the end of the year when it's done I'm going to work on Mirabilia's Lady of the Flag

3) Since receiving my Mamaw's jewelry box I decided I now had a good reason to stitch Dimple's Designs Embroidery and I will finish a Dimensions design Serene Shores I started back before I got married in 1985, both are Oriental designs. As soon as I round up both-they are probably out partying with Jane Atkinson and Beatrix Potter- I'll post pictures because I don't have links for them. It also gives me a reason to start Dimensions Mighty Samauri(think that's the name and forgive my spelling).

Now for a conversation starter and some ideas, how in the world does the eclectic stitcher make TW designs, Quaker designs, Reproduction samplers, mermaid, primitive designs, and Mirabilias, etc all work together in the same house? I can't begin to start to figure all this out.

My tastes are all over the place. I also think once I finish Lady of the Flag I want to pull out Design Connections Cowboy Boots which is a design I started a few years ago and it still makes me happy to see it and maybe get it finished. Not by the end of the year though, but maybe by next summer.