The Lost Is Found

The Christmas Tree Skirt that I mentioned in my last post is now found and under my tree.  My mother made this at my request probably 30 years ago.  She made beautiful things, often without a pattern, and always by the tried and true old methods.  I bought her a rotary cutter and mat several years before her death but to my knowledge she never used them.  She pretended to so she wouldn't hurt my feelings but I found her newspaper templates all over her house and her tiny bits of fabric cut sort of close to the size of the template.  She rarely measured and mostly just "eyeballed" her pieces.  She had absolutely no color sense most of the time, maybe because she was so determined to use true scraps.  When I asked for this tree skirt I envisioned red and green and maybe gold, Santa or reindeer or  peppermint sticks.  This is what I got.

Yep, those are calicos in red, yellow, navy and brown.  Every time I look at it I smile.  It was so typically her.  And it's a very high loft batting that puffs up between the quilting lines.  The quilting, by the way, is by hand using what I'm sure is polyester thread and the stitches are about a quarter inch in size and distance.

While it's not what most quilt lovers would consider to be a beautiful quilt I found myself welcoming it back to it's rightful place much like the father of the prodigal son.  I wasn't home when my husband found it and put it on the dining table to wait for me.  I'm sure my eyes lit up and a smile graced my face because it surely came immediately to my heart when I caught sight of it.  Like that prodigal son, who wasn't the best of sons by any stretch of the imagination, it was welcomed back for itself, a beloved member of the family.  The fabric doesn't matter.  The colors don't matter.  It doesn't even matter that there's nothing Christmasy about it.  It's the love and the memories that count.

And to top it all off, because the skirt brought all of that to mind, this morning I put on the one outfit of Mother's that I kept.  She died in 2003 and I gave her these slacks and this shirt at least 5 years before that so that tells you how old it is.  I wear it once in a great while when I'm missing her the most.  I put my hands in the pockets and what did I find?  A $5 dollar bill!  Oh I've worn this before so I'm sure I left it there myself, and that Mother didn't.  But just the same I feel her smiling at the "found" money and the tree skirt that I adore.  What a wonderful Christmas gift.  :)