Grandma

My Grandmother, Ethel, was an artist when it came to homekeeping. She sewed clothes for her family, canned fruits and vegetables that were so pretty you hated to open the jar, except that they tasted so good you just had to! Her house was always in order, her budget made to work no matter the circumstance, and her cooking, oh my! She cooked for the most part without recipes, much to my sorrow, but what recipes she had I have copied down. My grandmother was never wealthy and when she passed away I got her kitchen table and an apron (she always wore an apron) and her stack of feed sack materials. If you click on the picture you can get a closer view of the colors and patterns. I am sure many of you are familiar with feed sacks, they are one of the ways grandma made the budget stretch on the farm. I have many dresses and short sets from when I was little that were made by grandma's loving hands from these materials, and my girls wore them when they were little, they are packed away for the next generation now.

So I have a stack of fabrics that make me think of grandma, who I loved dearly, and jars full of buttons that I loved to sort as a child. My problem is I can't bear to cut the fabric up and use it. I sometimes think of making quilts for my girls out of it, because I believe in using things and not just packing them away, but it seems like such a finite resource and I want to end up with something special. But the truth is I just can't begin to make that first cut. I did sew a few little outfits for my girls when they were little but now the pile is even smaller and I just can't do it.

I see the cutest things that people do with buttons but I guess for now they will stay in a jar on my bookshelf. Every once in a while, my daughters pull them down and go through them, some they have used for a craft or two, but I think they just like looking at them as I did when I was a girl. Anyone out there have the same problem? Do you have something you want to use but don't have the courage to use it up?