So today is my day on the Holiday Lane Blog Hop and I can’t tell you how excited I am to be included with such a great bunch of talented quilters! Be certain to hop over and see the others (I’m having such fun seeing what everyone has come up with!)
Words & Stitches (That’s me!)
Trying to Blog
Peanut’s Patchwork
Moosestash Quilting
A Loose Thread
stitch, stitch, stitch
In Stitches and Seams
Hooked on Quilting
A Reformed Heath’n
Elaine – that other blog
As Sweet as Peaches
The Learning Curve Quilts and Such
Geema’s Wonderings
A special thanks to Madam Samm and Pauline Francis for pulling all this together and to Jill Finley for providing the pattern to use free. (If you don’t have the pattern by now, you should hop over to Jill’s site and get it!)
When I signed up on this blog hop, I had no idea what to make except that I knew that a pillow wouldn’t work for me. I happen to have a 106 pound black Lab named Nick who loves to carry pillows around the house! I didn’t want my new project ending up with doggie spit on it so I decided on a table runner. I loved Jill’s original color scheme but when I rifled through my Christmas stash, I decided to pull a different set of Christmas colors, the ones I remembered from my own early childhood….blue and silver. What I hadn’t counted on was that this one project would make me feel so connected to my past. Let me tell you the story…
When I was six, my father passed away suddenly from a heart attack. Before he died, the only Christmas colors in our house were blue and silver. Now, I’d love to say that we kept the tree blue and silver in his memory but, honestly, I remember my brother unscrewing those blue lights and subbing them out with red during the very first Christmas after Dad died. I’m the youngest so I guess they’d had a lot longer to get tired of blue and silver than I had. When you lose a parent that young, most of your memories are made up of what other people have told you. Somehow, in translation, my father’s insistence on blue and silver got tinged with a bit of, oh, I don’t know, the color wheel police. Now, first, I have to digress and tell you that there are two things that most people consider easy and I epic fail at…fusible applique and growing zucchini. No, seriously, I just can’t get the hang of either. I was determined to try fusible on this one but ended up pulling pieces off and deciding to hand applique. The hand applique time gave me more quiet “sit and think” time and, as I worked my thread through all that lovely blue and silver-ness, I was hit with a fact that had floated in my brain but never connected with the Christmas color story. My father was color blind. Red/green color blind. So very red/green color blind that my parents once drove on a trip through an area where the traffic signals were hung horizontally instead of vertically and my mom had to call out the colors for my dad. Suddenly, my dad’s insistence on blue and silver took on a whole different meaning. This man who was the son of a quilter and would be the father of a quilter took the limited amount of color available to him and made beauty with it. In another era, he might have turned out to be quite a quilter himself. If, of course, you love blue quilts, which I do. So, with a raise of the needle and thread to my dad, here’s my Blue and Silver Holiday Lane.
And now for the giveaway. I decided I’d love to help someone else get a little blue and silver in their holiday sewing, too. So, I’ve got this lovely one-yard piece to get you started. (Yes, I will ship internationally.)
Just leave me a comment telling me one of your favorite childhood memories (or anything else you’d like to say, I like to keep this easy.) I’ll use the random generator to pick the comment number of the winner. Thanks for taking the time to stop by and letting me share my story with you.
Happy quilting,
Beth
