My grandmother was a wonderful seamstress; she made lots of clothes for my Barbie and me. I was the envy of all my friends on my sixth birthday when I opened her gift to find dozens of new outfits for Barbie—sleepwear, play clothes, work dresses, and a ball gown.

She left me her beautiful wicker sewing basket when she died, which was mostly bursting with thread. Grammy used to save every single piece of thread that was longer than 6 inches; she had dozens of wooden spools in that basket, each with several colors of thread carefully wound by hand next to each other without overlapping. She probably wouldn’t have been too happy if she knew I just UNwound all those cool vintage spools and tossed out all the bits of thread. I’m designing a flip-picture puzzle (sort of like an abacus) using Ready-To-Go! Blank Board Blocks with the spools in between…I’ll post the project here as soon as I’m done!

But the best fabric story I have about my dear grandmother is from Christmas, circa 1966, when she lovingly made matching red holiday outfits for us. Mom got a red apron, Dad got a red vest, and little ol’ me got a cute red jumper. We all wore our Christmas cheer proudly that year (and I still have all the outfits in my hope chest).

Cut to several years later, when Dad was up at Grammy’s farm, sorting through boxes of his childhood memorabilia. Dad’s uncle had been in Germany during WW2 and had given Dad some extraordinary mementos, including a very large (and very frightening) authentic Nazi flag. Dad noticed the flag was missing and he asked Grammy where it was. She laid into him about how appalling it was to have such an evil thing in her house, and she told him she took it out and burned it years ago.

A while later, we found out that she had carefully cut away just the swastika from the flag and burned THAT, but being the thrifty seamstress that she was, she couldn’t bear to part with so much perfectly good red fabric… and… well, I think you know where this story ends.