The square I received was a solid dark brown. What? A baby quilt with dark brown in it? Nevermind. I decided to embroider it with a star. My note to Irene would explain that as I rocked baby Rachel I often sang "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." In the "How I wonder what you are" part of the song I would think about how I wondered how she would turn out--this baby, then this toddler--my own star.
Embroidering the flannel square--hah! First, I haven't embroidered for many years--decades, actually. Second, I didn't have any of the necessary supplies, being floss and an embroidery hoop. My friend Doris came to my rescue with the supplies, and to get a CLUE as to what the backstitch might actually look like I pulled out the fabulous, much cherished, quilt that Mom made when I was pregnant with aforementioned baby Rachel. She stenciled pictures from coloring books onto fabric pieces that she then mailed to family and friends with instructions to embroider the pictures and also their name. The most wonderful part--the part that makes me weep with joy and love and the memory of it--was that each contributor actually DID it--actually embroidered a quilt section and sent it back. OMG. Could this ever happen today? Answer: no. And that was a mere 30-some years ago.
How I cherish this quilt, with sections from all of my three grandmas (yes, three--there was a divorce when my dad was a boy), my best friends, my sisters, Tom's mom and sisters (for those of you who don't know, Rachel's dad and my second husband are both named Tom), my cousin, Rachel's future cousins.The quilt now resides in my cedar chest, but that is ridiculous. I plan to hang it and decorate the guest room in yellow-complementing colors. I've made it quite clear to Rachel that although this is her baby quilt, it is not really HERS, since all of these contributors were doing it for me and her father, not HER. They didn't even KNOW her. In other words, she can pry it from these cold, dead hands.
