The T-shirt of Memories

    Well, here it is in all its glory.  The infamous T-shirt quilt of the first half-century of my life. So I have already blogged about the first square ... the second has white appliques on the red shirt and they are from the post office.  The T-shirt was originally my mother's, then my sister had it, but I did work at the Vernon post office for one "Christmas rush" period a very long time ago.  The white bear is my version of the Kermode bear, our school mascot in Terrace.  The big lion on yellow is from our family trip to California when I was in high school ... San Diego Zoo.  The top right white T-shirt with Kermodes on it is from my cheerleading days.  (Yes, I was a high school cheerleader!)
     The next row starts with a mouse (my personal mascot) and is personalized with my name.  I love personalized things.  Universal Studios is next ... again from the California trip.  The navy one is Grad 78 and the green one at the end of the second row is from our family trip to Minitonas, Manitoba (my mom's birthplace) for the town's 80th anniversary, right after my graduation.   The trip was hilarious, as Mom and I sat in the back seat (we were the kids) and Dad and my grandma Nickoli sat in the front seat of the station wagon (they were the parents)  My sister was off at a French immersion camp, so she missed that experience.
    There are two squares with Woolworths T-shirts -- I worked there in the summers of 1979 and 1980.  The T-shirt had designs front and back, so I had two sides to represent the two summers.  One year I worked in plants and pets, and another I was front cash relief and folded a lot of souvenir t-shirts (foreshadowing, perhaps).  Then begins the Trinity Western saga ... Trinity Western College at the start.  North Upper was my dorm in first year.  The pale blue shirt from the City of London and the white one with the London Underground map come from the "Literary London" course that I took after my first year of Trinity (it was actually a TWC summer course ... unforgettable!).
    Row  4 starts with a Capernwray Bible School t-shirt ... I went to the Spring School to Carnforth in England (yes, I've lived in a castle).  The white one next to it is another mouse with "squeeze me, I love you" ... which I believe my mother made for me with an  iron-on transfer.  The black square is The Ed Norton Memorial Choir ... my roommate in 4th year was an artist, and this was a silk-screen that she had done ... kind of an inside joke, since Ed Norton was alive and well, and not in need of a memorial choir.  The wild one next to it is from the US Virgin Islands ... my UVic roomie travelled there and brought me back the shirt ... and the green one beside it is my actual UVic tank top.
     Row 5 starts with the Care Bear "grumpy bear" ... which was my nickname in my first year of marriage.  There's another Trinity Western University one, from a reunion, then "Chill Out" from a Mac's convenience store (I won it as a prize!).  The pink shirt from Florida is a souvenir from our honeymoon in August 1984. The white square at the end of the row says "I Love Music" ... again, I may have inherited this from my sister, but I do love music, and sang in choir at TWU and at Emmanuel Baptist.
    The bottom row (#6) begins with "Annie" ... I fell in love with the musical when I saw it in London, and loved it again when the drama class of Clarence Fulton performed it (I did a lot of substitute teaching at Fulton that year). There's another TWU alumni shirt, which is half of a square diagonally combined with part of the Mac's Chill Out shirt.  The black square has emblems from Zirka Dancing ... my 3 children were involved in Ukrainian dancing for a few years, and I got involved on the parent executive and helping to write  the stories for the year-end show.  EFBC "Just Jump In" was a shirt from our church Ministry Fair a few years back, encouraging everyone to volunteer for something.  And lastly, the light blue Creative Memories "Memoranza" shirt ... I was a Creative Memories consultant for several years, in the 21st century.
    The fabric I used for the sashing is cotton that I bought when I worked at Woolworths ... sort of a chambray or denim look with yellow and red patches on it.  It actually suits the "looking back" theme and certainly fits in to the time period for the first half of the quilt.  Somehow I managed to have just enough.  I made the quilt using the "quilt-as-you-go" method.  First I ironed on a stabilizer to keep the t-shirt from stretching, then I sandwiched the T-shirt and "sashing" with batting in the middle and the same fabric on the back as I used between the squares. Then I machine quilted diagonal lines across the squares, and finally sewed all the squares together and added outside borders and binding.  The quilt was finished on my 51st birthday ... and no, I don't think I'll do another one!

Everything I know about life I learned from a quilt

  Well, perhaps not everything.  And maybe not from just one quilt. But there are many lessons from quilting that apply to life ... I thought I saw a book by this title once, in a Christian book of the month club ... forgot to order it in time and then it was no longer available. (Well, maybe that wasn't the title ... I just googled it and some very strange things came up!).
  I am working on a T-shirt quilt now, another memory quilt.  Most, if not all, of the T-shirts were mine (some may have been my sister's, but for the first 20 years, we were in the same places most of the time).  I was almost finished it last spring, when it was 4 squares across and 5 squares down.  Then I was looking for something for another quilt and uh-oh -- I found another 10 or so T-shirt fronts that I had saved for this quilt.  Sigh.  Summer and my  Aug-Oct job intervened and I am finally back to the T-shirt quilt.
  The first square has YouthQuake '77 on it ... memories of the Terrace Evangelical Free Church youth group trip to Briercrest.  I appliqued part of another T-shirt on it from Camp Cherith ... the Pioneer Girls camp I attended for a few years, held at Ness Lake Bible Camp. I alternate a white square with a coloured one ... so YouthQuake is white, and the next one is red.  It reads "I'm in search of myself -- have you seen me anywhere?"  No doubt this is applicable to anyone's teen years.  It was also nicely form-fitting at the time.  I remember wearing it babysitting when it was new, and the baby spit up all over my shoulder (matched the white lettering).  Ah ... memories.
   There are quite a few shirts memorializing my days at Caledonia Senior Secondary and as a Kermode cheerleader, as well as the 20 year class reunion.  There seems to be a lot of pride in my schools, as I also have several from Trinity Western (dorm shirts and alumni shirts) and one from Capernwray Bible School (in England).  I even have one from the school production of "Annie" done by Clarence Fulton secondary students before the new Clarence Fulton school was built.  I taught there quite a bit in the early 1990s ... and I love the musical "Annie".
   I'll probably blog more about the various squares and their significance to me when I get it finished (soon, I hope) and post a photo of the finished product.  The interesting thing that happened while I was working on it was that one of the ladies from our church quilting group wandered over to see what I was doing, looked at some of the Terrace squares, and we realized we had been in the same schools from about grade 6 on.  Small world -- in which there are no coincidences!
   We have a quilt show at our church this Saturday ... I have the 3 quilts from my last post that will be displayed in it.  Then I can bring them home and curl up under them for the winter.  Most of my quilts are cuddly and warm.  My family seems to like them that way!
 

I'm a grown-up?

     It seems strange that I am now in my 50s ... one of the last of the baby boomer generation.  I have been aware for some time that I am not a kid anymore (something to do with having children and developing several chronic illnesses that make my body feel old).  But I am starting to think about the proverbial "bucket list" as I slide down the other side of the hill that was so hard to climb.  Things I do with or for my children also make me realize that I am the responsible adult in their lives.
     * Signing up the 16 year old boys (young men) for drivers education classes.
     * "Mom, can you order for me?  I don't speak Starbucks." (for the young woman)
     These are just the ones in recent days.
     There are exciting days in my life, which I never would have thought I would have at this ripe old age.  For one thing, I didn't think I was going to live to any ripe old age.  When I was about 10 or 11 years old, some travelling speakers at our church had predicted the world was going to end in 10 years.  My only thought was that I wouldn't yet be 21 and therefore wouldn't have gotten married and had children.  Having done both since then, I am a little more cautious about believing any end-of-the-world predictions.  ("No man knows the day or the hour.")  Then when I was diagnosed with polymyositis at age 25, my mental picture of my future changed to one where I was riding around in a wheelchair.  The information about polymyositis (inflammation of many muscles) at the time was that it usually happened to women after menopause, and the only person in the local area that I had heard of who had it was in Extended Care (she was 68) and had been in a wheelchair since she was in her 40s.  I am blessed to have married, have children, and still be walking around on my own two feet.
     I really can't get over the fact that I managed 7 weeks of working 5 days a week, 7 hours a day.  By the end of the time, I was much more full of energy at the end of the day.  It was cooler in October than August, so there was not the same heat exhaustion factor.  But I could walk the entire ranch to lock up the buildings.  I was hoping I would lose a lot of weight from all this exercise, and was a little disappointed not to see much difference on the scale.  However, I decided to wash my jeans (a good idea, every once in a while) and instead of having to lie down on the bed to do up the zipper after they went through the dryer, the jeans are loose!  So something fatty must have turned to muscle.
     Moms also have to make big decisions ... different ones than my mother had to make, though hers were big ones at the time. Today's family dilemma was who got to use the new digital video camera.  Daughter had asked me several days ago.  Son left a note before he went to bed to ask Dad (who left for work early in the morning).  So each had a parent who had said yes.  Ideally, one could have used it in the morning and the other in the afternoon ... but the son was waiting to hear from his friend what time they would leave for Kelowna ...  I made the executive decision that the first one to ask was the one who got to use it.  As it turned out, the son didn't get a ride to Kelowna with his friend (his mom wasn't sure about bringing another person to the event), so that ended well.  I should make up a sign-up sheet for equipment, I think.
     When you have 3 kids, they all think someone else is the favourite ... they don't understand that I love each of them intensely.  There isn't a measurement of "I love you more" with me.  It still amazes me that I was able to have the three of them.  Like all parents, I wish I could have done more with them ... more outings, holidays, trips to the park ... sewed more of their clothes ... I saw a sign outside a fitness centre offering classes for 12-14 year old girls ... and slightly mourned that my girl was grown past that age.  Not that I think she needs to exercise to lose weight!! She is a wonderful 18-year-old and very lovely.  Not just to me ... everyone who saw her grad pictures on Facebook said this as well.
    What's coming up?  Our church ladies quilting group is doing a show next weekend.  I have 3 quilts in it.  One is a sweatshirt quilt, with 9 sweatshirt fronts from things I have done over the years.  Another is a sort of medallion quilt ... it started with a 14x14 inch panel with a bunch of cats in a sewing room and then I added borders around and around until it was lap quilt size.  The third is a quilt made with fabric printed with stories from the "Dick and Jane" early readers.  I didn't have "Dick and Jane"  ... we had "John and Janet" ... but my aunt, who was a teacher, had all these discontinued readers ... and it was from her stash of fabric that I found the panels to make the quilt.  I love quilting.  I don't feel like I do it in any standard "quilter" way ... but I like to work with what some people call "cheater quilt panels" and then turn them into something different than what they were at the start.  Quilts I have in mind for this year are: 1) finishing my T-shirt quilt; 2) making a "bookshelves" wall hanging; 3) another cat panel quilt; and 4) finishing the bargello wall hanging I started this winter/spring.

Back to normal ... a little bit at a time

     It's been a couple of years since I blogged and I forgot all sorts of things ... including my password.  Since I also changed my E-mail address, I couldn't log on to my account or have my password sent to my old E-mail address.  I'm sure there is some technical way of fixing this, but I'm sure I'd lose my desire to blog while I was trying to figure it out.
     So the old blog is Kareabou Thoughts and the new one is Kareabout Thoughts ... since it will be about things I care about. (Brilliant, eh)
     I just finished 7 weeks of working at O'Keefe Ranch near Vernon.  I've discovered a new passion ... history!  Technically, history would be an old passion, I suppose.  Since my job at O'Keefe Ranch was a tour guide (officially:  "interpreter"), I found out that I loved dressing up in the Victorian costume and telling stories.  We actually did a lot of cleaning as well:  started with bathrooms in the morning, then cleaned windows, dusted and swept between tours.  I had applied for the summer interpreter job about 30 years ago when I was in university, but didn't get it.  So I finally got my "dream job" and they probably thought I was nuts, because I'd be walking from one building to another, singing to myself.
     Back to my other job at New Hope for Widow/ers, which is 2 mornings a week, doing office work.  New Hope is doing their annual fundraiser tomorrow night so I got up the nerve to contact the local radio station to do a little free promotion and the next thing I knew, I was on-air this afternoon for about 5 minutes.  I came home to a son who was excited that I'd been on the radio -- he said I sounded professional.  I was excited too ... it's not very often that my kids are excited about my accomplishments.  I do hope that a lot of people will come out to the fundraiser.  It's a Benefit Concert and Silent Auction ... music by The Cats and the Fiddle ... lots of great items in the silent auction ... bake sale ... and dessert buffet.
     Time to go ... life interferes with blogging.