As long as I can remember I was at my grandmother's house quite often. She was a divorced woman in her late 50's when I was born. I remember playing outside her one story home when I was very young. One of my earliest memories of being with her is simple: She had a small table for me set up in the kitchen area for lunch time. I cannot remember exactly what I was eating, but I remember the layout of the kitchen, and especially the black and white checkered floor.
She moved quite a bit in my years. After leaving the one story home she moved about an hour's drive to live in a retirement home, but the irony is she was not retiring there. She was the manager of the building. I remember walking into the front doors of the home and then right into her apartment. It was small, but I remember taking up the whole living room to play with toys. The porch to this retirement home was nice. I remember eating strawberries coated in sugar here, and it quickly grew into my favorite snack.
I had an experience at this retirement home that I will never forget. I was outside on the sidewalk playing, and there was this very large dog sitting beside this older woman who had on dark sun glasses. I was (and still am) an animal lover. I was only five at the time, and I wanted to pet this woman's dog. She had a harness on her. My grandmother told me I had to ask, so I did, and the woman said I could. I remember asking a variety of questions about the dog. Why she was wearing the harness? Does she bite? How old is she? The lady said that she was a working dog, and was on guard when she was working. You see, the dog was a seeing eye dog for this woman.
During my stays at the retirement home with my grandmother she and I did a variety of crafts. I remember watching her crochet in her chair all the time while she puffed on a few cigarettes. She would sit in her pink and white flowered night gown for hours and just crochet. She also took needle and yarn and "sewed" designs into these plastic grids and made "jewelry" sets that I could wear to school on special holidays. She made a crown, braceless and ring set out of these grids with the yarn, and then she would glue on stickers or beads with a hot glue gun. I loved wearing them when I was younger to school, mainly because it was something different the other students did not have and I stood out.
She only stayed at this retirement home for a few years, then moved back home again to be closer to the family. She moved into a one story home again, and I must say I loved this house. It set in the country on a dirty road just off from a highway. The inside had wooden walls and floors. I can still smell the wood if I think about it hard enough. At this home I received my first set of spider bites all over my ankles. I remember sitting at the kitchen table making homemade noodles. I took puffy paint and made a design on a piece of scrap fabric my grandmother had in her craft collection. I also remember going through boxes with my grandmother one day and we found a set of bouncy balls she had bought for me, and I spent hours bouncing them up and down on the hardwood floor.
This home was located on my aunt's property, and she was building a newer, bigger house on the property just yards away. They had went out and adopted a mixed breed puppy. He was black and white, and I had a great time playing with him. I remember one of my parents dropping me off at night, and I walked into the kitchen and looked in this large cardboard box and there he was looking up at me. His name was Bullet. We played out in the yard for hours at a time, and even as he grew up into a 60 or 70 pound monster I must say he was probably one of my favorite dogs I was around growing up. My aunt's husband accidently ran him over with his truck one day when Bullet was about eight or nine. The dog couldn't hear well anymore, and had been lying out in the driveway. Tragic death.
My grandmother moved yet again closer into town where I lived. This was the home I spent most of my time in with her when I was growing up. This home was actually the home she had built with my grandfather when my dad and his siblings were younger. My aunt had purchased it from my grandmother when she had decided to move to the first home I described. My aunt and her husband lived in this home until the larger home they had been building together was completed.
In this particular home, I remember mostly baking cookies for Christmas gifts with my grandmother, and also watching a lot of America's Most Wanted. She also bought a long arm machine to put quilts together at one point when I was younger but she never learned exactly how to use it. The machine took up most of her front living room. The home was a small home, another one story, but it was big enough for the two of us to spend time together and also for us both to have alone time. I was always wondering off doing my own thing. I could entertain myself for hours at a time. I was a loner for the most part growing up, and I was fine with this.
The home had three bedrooms, and I always went to this one bedroom, the room with the navy blue carpet, to draw on a dry erase board or play with the Legos my grandmother had for me. I would build houses and play with the little man and the horse I remember purchasing myself with my allowance money.
My most vivid memory of my grandmother is her sitting in her armchair, the one that she always fell asleep in during the late afternoon, crocheting. She was no longer smoking after her lung cancer surgery. She would sit in that chair for hours while I played, colored or watched movies and crochet. I would watch mesmorized while she would wrap the yard around her right hand and the needle would pull it through all the loops she had of her project, which was mostly afgans. I had tried multiple times to learn how to work with yarn the way she did. I thought it was a beautiful motion. I grew up sleeping with many of the afgans she would give us for Christmas, and wanted to make one myself. As a child I would have never had the patience to make such a large project even if I had attempted, but I could not get the hang of crocheting if my life depended on it. I was proud of myself for learning how to make the first row chain, and I made one that went about forteen feet across the floor once.
In my early years I was more focused on drawing pictures, and many of the pictures I drew I still have today. Over the years I grew tired of drawing, and when I was sixteen I took a sewing class and learned how to make the Log Cabin quilt. Even this class was too much for me. I was exhausted by the time this class started at six in the evenings and I had already been up for twelve hours between getting ready for school and then going to school. I learned more at home sewing than I did at this class.
The irony of this: When I was 16 years old my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer for the second time. She was in her early 70's in 2004. I remember seeing her at family events the year and a half before she was diagnosed with an oxygen tank close behind her. She did not have it all the time. I remember being younger and we went on trips and she would have to sit down to catch her breath, and this was after her lung cancer surgery had been completed. This second time she was diagnosed there was nothing the doctors could do but let it run it's course. She was given until July to live, but she made it until September 1st. I had started taking this quilting class about the time she was diagnosed, and one day in April or May I went over to her house to ask her to show me how to make a draw-string bag for a little girl I had been babysitting at my sister's soccer games, and she showed me her latest projects.
She was making over 3o Log Cabin Quilt tops. Her intensions were to give them to family members for Christmas, the Christmas she knew she would not be around for. I had no idea this is what she was planning on doing with those tops until after she had passed away. When I took my glass I had learned to use a cutting mat and rotary cutter with a ruler, which is a very quick process to cut fabric. My grandmother used SCISSORS to make her fabric strips. Using scissors would take more than twice as long as the rotary cutter. I could not imagine using scissors, but she said it was easier for her than using the rotary cutter. The rotary cutter was more of a modern invention for quilters when I started using it. Scissors were something of the past and she had grown up using the scissors. Needless to say I was impressed, as always, with her.
She showed me how she laid the blocks out to decide what pattern she wanted in the quilts. She had hung a piece of batting up in her room with a rod and shower curtain hooks and used it to stick the fabric on and moved the blocks around. I was crawling on the floor trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my quilt and how to lay it out. My grandmother could not do that in her condition. Not only did she have lung cancer but she had a hump on her upper back that caused her to hunch over, and she had arthritus, and in my family you are cursed with bad knees the moment you are concieved. My grandmother was very independent in her years of life, she proved that one to me.
When she passed away I still did not know how to crochet. I had just started to learn how to cross stitch (I only completed a small project with it). Over the years I have started many sewing projects, mainly quilts, and many have gone uncompleted. I have only completed two quilts out of the near dozen I have started. About a year and a half ago I learned how to use the Knifty Knitter Looms, and I am proud to say I have completed many yarn projects with them. I have made many scarves, but my proudest is the afgan I made for my friend Jessi's daughter Mileigha. I plan on making more in the future. I loved sitting on my bed for hours counting rows and watching the same movie over and over again. I know I watched the first Harry Potter movie over a dozen times while I made the afgan. Since I made the afgan I have messed around with crochet, and am starting to get the idea of how to do it. I know I will never be near as good as my grandmother with the crochet, but I am very thankful that I had her in my life to teach me how to be crafty. I know partly because of her I am the person I am today, who enjoys sitting at home even on Friday or Saturday nights sewing quilts for loved ones. She loved doing things for others, and so do I.
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