In huge news, our older daughter graduated high school!  I loved seeing her walk across that stage!  I’m so proud of her and her friends, and all of the hard work it was for them to get there.  (Let’s pretend for a moment that my husband was looking at the right camera.)

And it really was hard.  The last few weeks have been so stressful.  For her and for me, for lots of reasons.

I deal with stress by sewing.  And sometimes by napping.  (And also by snapping at people and eating too much, but we’ll concentrate on the crafty bit since this is a crafty kind of blog.)  So over the weekend I managed to take a good long nap.  I slept on a pillow I backed using a bit of an old sheet that used to belong to my Grandma.  That pillow is like the Comfort Food of Home Decor.  I lay my head on it and have visions of morning glories, the pumpkin patch, a sparkling creek and blue skies.  I can hear Grandma’s voice again and feel her unconditional love.  And suddenly the stress is easier to take.

I woke from that nap thinking of the quilt I’d started months before, meaning to use the rest of Grandma’s sheet as a backing.

Well, things hadn’t gone well with that quilt.  No matter how I worked with it, I kept pinching bits of the sheet in the quilting.  I’d undo it and try again, and eventually I just gave up.  I wanted it to be perfect.

Months later, there I was, S-T-R-E-S-S-E-D, and the nap with “Grandma’s pillow” had made me feel so much better.  Even with so many demands on my time, suddenly I just had to have that quilt I hadn’t finished.  And I didn’t care about silly pinches.  Unconditional love doesn’t complain about a few pinches in the backing of a quilt, does it?

I finished the quilt in record time (hooray, nervous energy!) and it did pinch the backing like crazy.  Somehow though, after the crinkly quilting magic of the washer and dryer, the pinches are barely noticeable.  Why did I wait so long?

My daughter and her friends graduated.  I have a quilt that feels like a hug from Grandma.  It’s all good.

Aslan has approved of this quilt and would like to nap on it now, thankyouverymuch.

The front was made from charm squares from Moda’s Dream On collection, which was inspired by sheet patterns from the 70s and totally made sense of the whole Grandma’s-sheet-as-backing kind of thing.  And now, let’s get this summer started!