Oleta (my mother-in-law) invited me to go with her as her daughter to a Mother-Daughter High Tea. What a lovely compliment to me! Thank you, Oleta! So we went together to the High Tea. Everyone brought their own cups and saucers to the event. Oleta brought hers for us to use ~ I love these sweet flower-painted cups!
Helen is the guardian angel of these events where Oleta lives, and we sat with her and Helen's favorite niece in all the world. And then the High Tea turned into something unexpected!
Have you ever been so taken by surprise that you didn't know what to say?
Well, I was taken by exactly that kind of surprise.
But now the cat is out of the bag! For Helen and Treva and Tom and Fenwick (Fenwick the dog! Yes, yes, it's really all true, do please read on) presented me with a gift at the High Tea.
And, furthermore, it turns out that my husband knew all about this surprise gift and had even contributed a package of transfer sheets so that Tom and Fenwick the dog could do some copying magic.
And that for months Helen and Treva (and, really, I am not sure who all else) had been stitching and stitching and stitching to make something wonderful just for me.
Here it is ~ an incredibly wonderful quilt with images of seventeen of my cards on it. Tom and his trusty dog Fenwick figured out how to use the transfer sheets and they are the ones who put my cards onto cloth. Then Helen and Treva put the cloth images onto the quilt cover. Oh, and found the fabric and cut the fabric and stitched the fabric . . .
I hung the quilt across the bookshelves in my box room to take a photo of it. This is the room where I work, read, hide, during the day. You can see all the brown boxes across the top of the bookshelves ~ hence the name "box room." This is the room, when we first moved in, where everything in boxes ended up until we could sort them all out, and then somehow, the box room became my room ~ my Virginia Woolf "room of my own" hideaway.
And now the box room is graced with something new ~ this wonderful quilt.
Here it is on the chair that I can usually be found in, reading, or typing away on my laptop. Now I can be found enfolded in this quilt.
And I do believe that a quilt is really the supreme gift.
It is a work of art, it is practical for it can be used for warmth and comfort, and it is a true labor of love (all those hundreds of tiny stitches!)
Here are the stitches, traveling up and down, back and forth across the fabric of this quilt. Such tiny hand-made stitches, bobbing up and down in this ocean of cloth.
I can almost see silver needles breaking through the surface, rising up into the air, and then plunging back down again.
Very dolphin-like, I would imagine.
Here are the wonderful colors and patterns that Helen chose for the border of the quilt.
Do you see the yellow polka-dotted fabric? Helen explained to me that it was chosen because it matched the fabric in my first children's picture book.
Yes, there on the cover are the magical polka-dots that Nancy Carpenter, the illustrator, designed for the baby's dress and sash in my children's picture book story, A Far-Fetched Story. Oh my! What a kind and thoughtful detail to add to such a kind and thoughtful quilt.
You can see how simply overcome I was by such a gift.
I have sat with this lovely little quilt in my arms, thinking of how, in the cold months of late winter and throughout the spring and into the summer, a gift was being made for me, and I never knew it.
Is it not that way with so many things that happen to us in our lives? While we are off doing other things, something wonderful is being prepared for us, and then, suddenly, it is bestowed upon us.
Created by Treva, Helen, Tom, Fenwick, 7-3-09
Maybe someone just like our guardian angel Helen and the lovely Treva and the wonderful Tom and the magnificent Fenwick are making a surprise for you this very minute. I have this sneaky feeling that someone is getting ready to astound you, too!
Well, I do know one thing for sure. I will be carrying this quilt around with me everywhere, dragging it from room to room, a regular Linus blanket, for the rest of my life. I will treasure every teeny tiny stitch of it, forever.
Thank you! Thank you!
And goodbye until next week . . .
