Living Out Loud
Mar. 10th, 2010 12:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stitchwhich... Just once, Izzy, just for you. Although this might be a 'sort of' zip past your assigned topic.
On Dungarees and Old Blue Jeans
Years ago, we tried starting a baby. And we failed - five times that we knew of for sure, the last failure involving the loss of twins at 5 months preggers. We got confirmation of that loss while learning that I had managed to get re-pregnant less than 2 weeks later... Arn was stationed aboard a ship and had come in for a quick one-week visit between 3 (or 4) month deplayments. So we knew the window.
Anyway.
About the same time that I started to show, the navy authorised personal bedding for aboard ship. This meant that guys could bring their own sheets (if you were a fool!) and their own blankets to use on their bunks (racks, they are called.) The nesting overdrive was already strong in me - I wanted to make a quilt for Arn that would symbolise 'home and family' for him. So I started saving all of his worn-out work pants, "dungarees" as they were called. And saved all my maternity pants also. After Zack was born (look ma! Success!) I carefully cut the dungarees into squares that included the back pockets and his name-label above them. Let someone try to steal that! Hah! A few of the squares were embroidered with designs, one with the date on it, lovingly stitched with Dual-duty sewing thread since the Navy Exchange didn't carry embroidery floss... then I sent the quilt off to him with a new novel tucked into each pocket.
We kept saving work pants. The uniform had switched to Navy high-top jeans by the time Zack was a year old but they were still called dungarees. And when he moved from his crib to his Big Boy bed, it was covered with a quilt made of his father's work pants, decorated over the years with patches from places we'd gone as a family (except for one patch that was given to Zack about 12 years ago by Sir Gregory, from his Aussie police department). And when Shawn (pregnancy #13 after Zack) was a Big Boy, he got one of his own. They've all three gone on nearly 14 years of camping trips, have survived cross-country moves and trips back and forth to the grandparents in South Dakota, have been beach blankets, car blankets, and the playground for two ferrets (probably explains how the ties all came undone, eh?). They had been what my sons curled up in while sick at home, or in front of the TV, been the walls of forts and castles, and the curtains of bunk-bed stages. They've hidden messes the boys didn't want their parents to find and been the kleenex for more than one set of Manly Tears.
Shawn's quilt is still in his possession. Zack asked if he could take his father's quilt with him when he moved away five years ago, along with his own. And last year, he brought both of them back - the seams were beginning to fray and the quilting (they are all 'tied quilts') had come undone. He begged me to save them, fix them. There was no rescuing most of the fabric - for 30 years, those two quilts had been in active use. I saved what I could and augmented with the very last of the stockpiled pant legs and now I have two wide piles of new pieced blocks. The pattern is different, due to the desire to salvage as much as I could of the fabric of the old quilts, but he'll find familiar embroideries on them and some of the squares are butter-soft, just as he remembers them... and some have streaks of missile fluid and paint stiffening spots here and there.
There are sufficient amounts of squares that I can make three full-sized quilts. So I will; one for Zack, one for Arn, and one for me. Because they are Family Love that keeps us warm.
So it's not a favorite piece of clothing, per se, but - well, it is.
On Dungarees and Old Blue Jeans
Years ago, we tried starting a baby. And we failed - five times that we knew of for sure, the last failure involving the loss of twins at 5 months preggers. We got confirmation of that loss while learning that I had managed to get re-pregnant less than 2 weeks later... Arn was stationed aboard a ship and had come in for a quick one-week visit between 3 (or 4) month deplayments. So we knew the window.
Anyway.
About the same time that I started to show, the navy authorised personal bedding for aboard ship. This meant that guys could bring their own sheets (if you were a fool!) and their own blankets to use on their bunks (racks, they are called.) The nesting overdrive was already strong in me - I wanted to make a quilt for Arn that would symbolise 'home and family' for him. So I started saving all of his worn-out work pants, "dungarees" as they were called. And saved all my maternity pants also. After Zack was born (look ma! Success!) I carefully cut the dungarees into squares that included the back pockets and his name-label above them. Let someone try to steal that! Hah! A few of the squares were embroidered with designs, one with the date on it, lovingly stitched with Dual-duty sewing thread since the Navy Exchange didn't carry embroidery floss... then I sent the quilt off to him with a new novel tucked into each pocket.
We kept saving work pants. The uniform had switched to Navy high-top jeans by the time Zack was a year old but they were still called dungarees. And when he moved from his crib to his Big Boy bed, it was covered with a quilt made of his father's work pants, decorated over the years with patches from places we'd gone as a family (except for one patch that was given to Zack about 12 years ago by Sir Gregory, from his Aussie police department). And when Shawn (pregnancy #13 after Zack) was a Big Boy, he got one of his own. They've all three gone on nearly 14 years of camping trips, have survived cross-country moves and trips back and forth to the grandparents in South Dakota, have been beach blankets, car blankets, and the playground for two ferrets (probably explains how the ties all came undone, eh?). They had been what my sons curled up in while sick at home, or in front of the TV, been the walls of forts and castles, and the curtains of bunk-bed stages. They've hidden messes the boys didn't want their parents to find and been the kleenex for more than one set of Manly Tears.
Shawn's quilt is still in his possession. Zack asked if he could take his father's quilt with him when he moved away five years ago, along with his own. And last year, he brought both of them back - the seams were beginning to fray and the quilting (they are all 'tied quilts') had come undone. He begged me to save them, fix them. There was no rescuing most of the fabric - for 30 years, those two quilts had been in active use. I saved what I could and augmented with the very last of the stockpiled pant legs and now I have two wide piles of new pieced blocks. The pattern is different, due to the desire to salvage as much as I could of the fabric of the old quilts, but he'll find familiar embroideries on them and some of the squares are butter-soft, just as he remembers them... and some have streaks of missile fluid and paint stiffening spots here and there.
There are sufficient amounts of squares that I can make three full-sized quilts. So I will; one for Zack, one for Arn, and one for me. Because they are Family Love that keeps us warm.
So it's not a favorite piece of clothing, per se, but - well, it is.
