Throwback Thursday

I've started this post a dozen times and erased it and restarted it as often. I've put in another day at packing; I'm tired and at 7:30 it's too early to go to bed.

My sister sent me a picture of a family treasure she had re-framed, and I thought I'd make it the subject tonight. I am too tired to think of a title, until I hit on Throwback Thursday, to describe the bit of nostalgia she took to the framing shop. 

Then I realized it's not Thursday. Too bad.

Mom always signed and dated her quilts. A corner block of this Sunbonnet Sue has her name, Lenore, and the date she finished the quilt, 1936. I slept under this quilt, and I'm sure my brothers and sister did, after me.

When it was old and seer, our dad made a frame and put this worn out, dated corner of the quilt into it. Jan had it put into another frame and has hung it in her studio. I see the reflection of other things I know hang on her wall, but I also see stains of history.

Dad made a frame probably in the sixties after he retired and could pot about at jobs he enjoyed. Let's say 1966, for the math of it, which means the quilt gave thirty years of hard service and washings. 

I see a couple of brown stains that I can account for. As a child in the forties and fifties, I was prone to ear infections and one remedy was to run a vaporizer overnight, with a nasty brown "medicine" distributed by the steam. I remember it being spilled one night, before it landed in the vaporizer, and left a nasty mark on the quilt.

Mom was quite sad about that. "It will never wash out!" was all she ever said about it, though. If you enlarge the picture, you will see how thin it became in those years of service.

Mom made a Sunbonnet Sue quilt for each of her granddaughters. I wrote about her quilts years ago when I began blogging. That link is to the Sunbonnet Sues. If you put "quilts" in the search box, you can find all the posts I did of all her quilts we still have.