Ted's Stars

Ted's Stars
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

I don't know if many of the people who read this have been around long enough to remember the days when my mom finished a quilt practically every week. It's been a couple of years now, although in 2005 she still managed to make a good many. Mostly her big productivity years were before the brain tumor announced its presence in the 2nd half of 2004. For the five years or so before that, she spent a really major amound of her time sewing. She gave a lot of them away, and she even sold some (mostly for far less than they were worth), but when we started pulling quilts out of the closet today, we pulled out nearly a dozen bed-size quilts that she had made. Seriously. And that wasn't counting the wallhangings and small quilts. We didn't even get to the closet upstairs where most of the smaller ones are.

The one in the picture took more than a week to make, I think. She called it "Ted's Stars" - I think because she was working on it when her brother Ted died in late 1999. I told my aunt (that is, Ted's widow) that she could have it - it's a good thing I didn't look at it before I told her that because I would've been tempted to keep it. It's prettier than I remembered it was.

As it is I am going to end up keeping more of them than I really have any use for, probably. There are some that I just won't be able to bear to get rid of, I think, and I don't think my sister will take more than a couple, although it's possible that she could fool me. (When I asked her about it she said, "Now I don't like anything that's the least little bit country..." Whatever.)