In Memory

Memorial Day is the day we remember those fallen in service to our country.  Unfortunately for my family, this is also the weekend we buried my mother.  She lost her battle with cancer four months after diagnosis.  However, I do not want this post to be about how she died, but a remembrance and celebration of how she lived.

You see, in my admittedly biased opinion, my mother was a remarkable woman.  She taught us kids that math was a challenge to be met head on.  She could learn how to play any musical instrument she picked up in about a week.  By the time a plane could get her to a foreign country, she would have learned enough of the local language to get around.  She was also the woman who introduced me to crafts.

My earliest crafting memory of my mother, she was sitting at her sewing machine, making a little jumper dress for one of us girls.  Most of my youth, she sewed or quilted.  My mother always enjoyed sharing her knowledge and love for creative outlets. She taught a quilting class at the local fabric shop and taught me how to crochet.

This foundation, knowing that crafting was a good outlet for your creativity, spurred me to learn how to knit once I got to college.  I even poked around until I figured out that the little shuttle in my grandmother's sewing box was for tatting and learned how to use it.  Though only knitting translated back to my mother when I went home on vacation.

I knew that she liked to learn new skills, but I didn't fully appreciate the full spectrum of her dabbling until my sister and I helped organize her craft room for her. She had books on basket weaving and paper making.  She had leather scraps and stamps for leather working.  She had boxes of beads and ended up with a wall full of yarn.  She had upholstery fabric and embossing powder.  I'm not sure even now we know all of the crafts she tried.  I do know that she loved to create and never felt restrained to just the crafts she knew at the time.

When did you first become interested in your craft?  Have you tried more than just what you started with?