Welcoming the Future While Remembering the Past

This is my first post on my new blog and I'm really excited!  You may look at my profile picture to the left and think that I'm 6 years old but this is my first grade picture that was taken in 1960 (you can do the math).  I call it my Susie Jane picture because my mother named me Susan Elizabeth but always called me "Susie Jane".  I don't know where she got that but it had to have come from her southern roots.  Her name was Carrie Mae and she was born and reared in central Alabama.  Most of the women in her family went by double names such as "Lily Mae", "Willie Mae", "Joyce Faye", etc.  

Carrie Mae (my mother)

Mother was a beautiful lady that only lived 66 years.  She had green eyes that could look right through me as she would stop and look down at me before we entered a business or someone's home and say, "Now, Susie Jane, don't you embarrass me in here, you hear?"  The cardinal sin in our family was to do anything that would embarrass Mother and I was always the one that succeeded in doing just that.  My older siblings were much better at "being good".  

Mother came from a home where the women sewed.  They made their own and their daughters' clothes, crocheted intricate tablecloths and bedspreads, kept every scrap of fabric and turned these scraps into warm quilts for their families.  I do not remember ever visiting my grandparents' home in Alabama and not seeing women sewing in the living room.  In that part of the state there were many textile factories at the time and my step-grandmother (Wilbur Sue, yes that was her name!) would get scraps of fabrics and trims from friends that worked in the sewing factories.  I made many night gowns for my dolls from the nylon and lace scraps that she always seemed to have.  

In future blogs, I'll be telling you more about the women in my family and how they influenced my love of sewing.  I'll also be posting old family photos and new photos of items I'm sewing today.  

Thanks for reading my blog and come back soon, ya hear?