Words by Terryl

My Grandmother’s Blanket, The Sequel

“You’d be happier with a smaller project.”

Blink.

My stitch ‘n bitch buddy Janey is fastidiously polite. As the words left her lips my inner child—a cranky toddler who won’t take a nap because she’s afraid she’ll miss something—was already braying ‘you’re not the boss of me.’

“Awwww, but Janey,” I whined, “You told me this old comforter is too far gone to repair. Using it in a new quilt is the only way I can think of to save it. It’s dearly beloved! I can’t just let it go for . . . what do they become in their afterlife, anyway, these blankets that become such a part of our lives? Doris made this for me back when I was living and working in Summit County. I wasn’t 25 yet. My adult life is ground into it with the stains and tears. I’ve huddled under this Doris blanket for comfort through so many train wrecks I hardly know who I’d be without it. It’s seen me through three boyfriends, two careers, and three states. I can’t stand the thought of it becoming a . . .a . . . what? Dog bed? Padding for moving furniture? Cleaning rags? Trash?”

“Well, okay,” Janey said, “but I still think you’d be happier with a smaller project for your first quilting project. You know, maybe a tea towel or a placemat or something.”

Sensing the crack in her resolve, my inner toddler exulted the success of her tantrum.

“But Janey-Jane, I asked you to teach me to quilt because I love quilts. I want a blanket. And look, here is one. You said anything that has three layers sewn together counts as a quilt. Why can’t we piece together a new top with those counted cross stitch pieces I bought at the garage sale, use an old flannel sheet for the bottom, and put this one in the middle? You know, use it as the batting.”

Janey is also unfailingly kind. She didn’t roll her eyes or anything.

“Well, you can. The Doris blanket is a comforter. It was too thick to be quilted from the start, it had to be tied. That’s 2” batting in the middle of it. If you make this quilt the way you want it’s going to be heavy, T, and a beast to work on. It’s going to have to be hand-quilted unless you take it to someone with a commercial grade machine and pay for it to be finished.”

The cross-stitched pieces I would use for the new top were snowflakes, so the overall theme of the quilt was snow. A blanket of snow. How heavy could it be?

After she helped me piece the top together, we moved my dining room table into the kitchen and nailed the blanket of snow—the flannel sheet, the Doris comforter, and the top—to the dining room floor. We’re talking queen-sized here and that was the only floor space in my house big enough to accommodate it. We crawled around on our hands and knees for hours pinning it together.

Three years later, the blanket of snow had earned itself another name. The Monster Blanket. Every evening I’d wrestle another six inches of that heavy bitch into a ring and spend the evening hand quilting it. It took a movie per ring to do it. Not so bad in the winter, but sweltering work in summer.

Janey’s quilts are fiber art. It’s why I asked her to teach me. She’s a much better teacher than I am a student, but we found we agree on many things as the Monster Blanket progressed.

We agree that the voices of Il Divo make us feel like, well, much younger women.

We agree that although she has the higher number, Janey is the younger girlfriend. Janey is little bitty. She says she’s five feet tall and freely admits she has a case of short woman’s syndrome. Janey works out (she can bench press her body weight) and you really don’t want to tell her she’s too little to do anything.

We agree that Thursday afternoon stitch ‘n bitch was the high point of the week ‘till she moved away.

And we agree (now) that I was batshit crazy to make that Monster Blanket like I did, as does anyone I show it to who knows what they’re looking at. To her credit and as another testament to the steadfast nature of her kindness, Janey listened to my constant complaining about the Monster Blanket all those years and never once said ‘I told you so.’ A true friend.

The Monster Blanket remains a beautiful misery. I use it because I funneled so much of my life force into it. How heavy could it be? It could be so heavy it partially dislocates my knee when I turn over in bed at night.

Sequitur [^1]

I tried to let this one go, I really did. After it became too fragile to use I stuffed it in a garbage bag and put it out in the shed. To make it easy to toss in the trash barrel when the day came for its funeral. It was, in its youth, an opulently beautiful thing. A blush peach satin comforter, puffy down, with silk piping around the edge and a flower quilted into the center.

It was originally one of my grandmother’s blankets and came to me in the camping gear after my father died. As a child I was mystified that this gorgeous, sensual thing was stuffed in the heavy canvas and cotton batting sleeping bags of the day but I was always grateful for its slippery warmth.

I was just about to be able to throw it away too when I watched Grand Hotel with Greta Garbo. Her plush 1932 hotel room was furnished with beautiful art deco comforters like the one that was sitting in my shed in a garbage bag waiting to die. If my life history had saturated the Doris comforter, my grandmother’s blanket was puffy because it had three generations of my family stuffed into it. It’s 90 years old.

My grandmother would have been in her mid-twenties in 1932. It occurred to me that she would have been a young, beautiful, vivacious woman with sparkly eyes and smooth skin like Greta and, with her towering intellect, the world at her feet. It might have been part of her trousseau. By the time I came along that husband was long buried and, maybe not wanting to seem too sentimental about something from her first marriage, she gave it to my grandfather, her second husband, who used it as camping gear.

Dammit, Greta, there’s no way in hell I can throw this thing away now.

I go out to the shed and open the garbage bag. The poor old thing falls apart at the slightest touch. I hang my head. It’s now or never.

I move the dining room table into the kitchen and spread the dear old thing out on the floor. Gingerly. With resignation. The satin is so rotten down is escaping, along with one tiny moth the cat played with for the rest of the day. There’ll be no nailing this one, I have to pick it up carefully to pin its new layers on—satin on one side and crushed velvet on the other.

The Moral of the Story – Nonsequitur

If you ask someone to teach you something, to share their expertise and experience listen to them. Don’t argue and don’t let that cranky control-freaky toddler deep down inside you screw up your quilting project. Again.

I gotta write Janey now and eat some crow. Eat some more crow. Greta and her hotel are two years in the rearview mirror and I have, after hundreds of hours, at last hand-stitched new covers, front and back, onto my grandmother’s blanket. The work is incredibly tedious. The going is so slow that the cat makes a nest in it, passes out, and gets pissed off when I have to move it to access the next few inches. I can’t see well enough to make even stitches if I did have the skill, which I don’t. It looks like Dr. Frankenstein has been working on it.

I need my life back. I need my loft back. It looks like The Monster Blanket, The Sequel (MB2, for brevity) met the chainsaw massacre up here. MB2 is slippery and slides off the work table. My vision is so poor I have to have my nose right down on top of it to stitch it and it kills my neck. Every time I inadvertently nick the underlying satin I pull a puff of down through with the thread and sneeze my head off. Bits of MB2 and the material and tools it requires fill my formerly comfortable workspace. This is plier sewing at its very worst.

I am insane. I do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. MB2 is finished and on the bed now. It is no longer the boss of me. Someone in a future generation of my family—someone with more sense and backbone than me—can throw it away. Meanwhile I’m reclaiming my loft. I think I’ll make placemats for Christmas gifts this year, maybe some tea towels.

Sequitur

The next one to go will be the rainbow quilt Helen’s mom made. It’s been my curl-up-on-the-couch-with-a-good-book or stay-home-from-work-sick blankie for over 40 years. It’s on hospice now. Janey—the quilt doctor—diagnosed it as beyond repair over ten years ago. I don’t know if it’s going to make it through the washing machine again. I won’t know how to read or be sick without it. If you can find a shred of compassion for me, when its time comes, take it from my hands—gently, because it’s an old friend and it’s a sad thing when an old friend dies—and tuck it in around your sweet dog. Then turn me around and—ungently, because I’m clearly not able to learn the easy way—kick me right square in the ass. Please. I beg you. I’m not well. It would be such a kindness.

[^1] : Academics have complicated use of the terms *sequitur *and nonsequitur. Generally I like making things more complicated than they need to be as well (obviously). But as I use *sequitur *and nonsequitur here, in a straight across translation from Latin, they mean only *it follows *and it doesn’t follow.

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Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.

Terryl is the author of:
The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 ‏: ‎ 978-0-9894698-5-2

AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.

A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.

Together, we are MoonLit Press where words and images matter.