It's About Time

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

It's red month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and I have a top finished.  I've been working on it for 54 years!  Well, sort of.  It's a long story.  You might want to grab a beverage.

In 1967, my family would soon be moving to a neat old house.  My mom bought this kit, to make an embroidered quilt for my bed.  That fall, the women and girls in our household (my mother, my grandmother, my sister Steph, and I) started embroidering the blocks in the evenings.  This was the first time Steph and I had done embroidery, and it was kind of fun.  Each red stitch was supposed to cover an x printed on the cotton fabric.  When we got those done, we could do the lazy daisy stitches in green.

 After we moved, we were busy with new schools (Steph and brother Bryan to elementary, me to Junior High) and Mom and Dad were working full time as well as painting and scraping wall paper, etc.  The quilt project got set aside.

When I was in college many years later, I started doing needlework kits from Woolworths.  Mom and I got to talking about the quilt kit, and she gladly gave it to me.  Some pieces were missing, but I figured I could think of a way to fix it.

 From then on, the quilt was on my radar, but it kept getting set aside.  I got married, and had three children.  I got interested in pieced quilts (okay, obsessed) and loved making them by machine.  I often brought the old embroidery blocks with me on vacations (because everyone needs handwork on vacation!) and both my daughters learned to embroider the same way my sister and I had.  On one trip, Steph's step-daughter also put her first embroidery stitches in a block.

Eventually, the blocks I had were finished.  But there were not enough of them to even make a twin bed quilt.  I couldn't figure out how to set them that would use them all, and I refused to leave any blocks out.  Then one day, while looking for something else, I found the same kit offered on Ebay.  It was for a double bed, and had never been opened.  I was over the moon when I had the winning bid.

 Now I had everything I needed.  When the white blocks were done, I started on the red ones, which only have a few lazy daisy stitches.  Then I came to the borders.  I had two of the original borders, which I believe were done by my grandmother.  The borders from the "new" kit were longer of course, since they were for a double bed, so I had to cut them to make them fit.  I used four of the extra red blocks in the corners.  Just last week, I did the last of the embroidery and sewed on the last border.  It's not the same as the original layout, but I think it will do.

 I'm sure you can see the imperfections.  There is a large rust stain from a metal embroidery hoop, and a few other stains and marks that may or may not wash out.  Some of the blocks are done without separating the floss properly, which makes them appear darker.  There are lots of crooked stitches, made by little girls just learning to work a needle.  I love all of it.

After more than 50 years, this kit is finally a quilt top.  What's next?  Hand quilting, of course.  I can't wait.  It's about time.

Here's a reward for reading this long story.

My daughter sent this picture of my little buddies playing dress up.  They make me laugh every day.

I hope you can have a good laugh today about something silly.  Stay safe, and have a wonderful week.

Cheers for reading this,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy 

Cynthia at Oh Scrap