Care is home sick, we’re waiting to get the call to go into the clinic. This has got to stop – neither of us slept last night with her coughing and wheezing and wandering around. Well, I wouldn’t have slept either, but she’s 14. She needs sleep. But, as I wait, I began some research on quilts, and the interweb gave me a gift.

I don’t even recall what words I typed into google. I know quilt was one of them, but I was looking for particular quilt patterns, not these particular embroidery patterns. The embroidery goddess must have remembered my occasional forays into heartbroken searches for these…(the linked page only shows three samples, not the entire collection).
The Rhymeland Quilt Collection

This is the letter I sent artist Ruby Short McKim’s granddaughter this morning:

When I was ten years old, my grandmother let me watch – but not touch – as she pulled out her childhood embroidery patterns. She had twelve of the Rhymeland patterns that she had carefully traced onto onionskin paper so as not to harm the originals. She’d received them as a young woman, and had carefully saved them over the years. I fell in love with those images, and ten years later, she and I very carefully traced them onto material so I could embroider a wall hanging for my as yet unborn daughter.

All of the blocks were finished, and we’d sewn them together to begin quilting when life intervened, and later, my grandmother began showing signs of Alzheimer’s. Projects were set aside, and eventually forgotten. After she was placed in a home, I went to gather the half-finished project and the patterns she and I treasured, with my grandfather’s permission, only to find that another family member had taken them, and would not return them.

While I hurt a bit for my lost project, I hurt more for the loss of the original patterns, the safety patterns, the nearly antique skeins of cotton, the ancient needles and hoop and my grandmother’s fine needlework samplers.

Now I’ll be able to share those patterns with my own daughters, and I can’t even begin to tell you how that feels.

Not only are the twelve Gran had in this collection, there are more. So many more. I know it’s utterly ridiculous, but I’ve been sniffling since I first saw the page load. I thought I’d never be able to get these again, I thought they were something long forgotten from another era.

Nothing can replace Gran’s stuff, absolutely nothing. But I can still share the thought and the craft with the girls. In an odd way, something of Gran will go on to the girls’ children.

To me, this is an epic win.