Memories of my mother & some SRE

One Christmas many years ago, my mom and I both gave each other the same gift for Christmas - Judith Montano's Crazy Quilt Odyssey book. It was so fun and so funny. I don't remember how I learned to embroider, but I was doing it as a teenager - I think I might have been self-taught. My mother didn't teach me, rather I taught her. At one time she was sentenced to 6 months of bedrest because of an enlarged heart. During that time I flew back to Ohio to cook her some meals and help care for her. While I was there, I taught her embroidery. She was always very creative and talented - she won countless awards for her sewing and her Japanese flower arrangements. She would cut off every bud except one on a dahlia, then when that one bloomed it would be a fabulous flower.

She took to embroidery like a kitten to milk. When you're laid up for 6 months, what more fun could there be than to have the mailman delivering weekly packages of fun threads and fibers? Since SharonB's inaminuteago blog got me back on the CQ track, I got out her CQ squares and have been thinking a lot about her. She died about 14 years ago and had 16 squares - some finished, most not. One interesting thing she put on one of the squares was a tombstone with her mother's initials and lifetime dates. I wonder if I'll eventually add one for her.

After she died, I was depressed for about 2 years. I eventually did this embroidery of her as a young woman walking through heaven. For her, I thought, heaven would be very flowery. And she could go back to being a younger woman, walking through the garden of Eden. Her name was June.

Well here she is... She is walking on some antique kimono fabric that I inlaid into the brocade fabric, then embroidered over the seam with all kinds of flowers. You can see close-ups of the stitching if you click on my flickr pix on the right side bar. The pix have descriptions of some of the stitches I used.