Tina

My mom moved into the nursing home last weekend.  She has made the adjustment well and sounds so happy!  Do you know how blessed that makes a daughter 8,000 miles away feel?  

She’s had a warm welcome by the residents.  She likes her room with her new closets and curtains. She has some new "things" to excite her, like a duvet cover and fluffy sets of towels – the sorts of things that delight most women, obviously at any age :)  My sister-in-law helped her think through taking some of the old familiar things too – the important ones – for comfort and familiarity.  The nursing home is right across the street from the library with a pedestrian crossing virtually from door to door.  An avid reader, Mom has already been to the library to check out a book. Sunday, she was picked up for church and asked by the minister to stand up. I hope and pray that, here, in the very golden time of her life, she has a fair span of golden days to enjoy with good health and energy and that she has courage to make golden opportunities of everything she can.  I phone her almost every day, so I’ll keep nudging her with enthusiasm and praise.

But let me tell you about Tina! 

After my dad died 4 years ago, a sweet little fox terrier on the farm suddenly adopted my mom.  It’s just what she needed in her time of deep loneliness and grief – a furry companion to cuddle, to lie with her when she napped and to follow wherever she went like a quick spotted shadow.  In the mornings, when Tina is let out of the kitchen, the first thing she did was to dash to my mom’s cottage, push the door open and jump on her bed!  I’ve heard Mom tenderly say, “Feel her little ears – they are like velvet!” and “Doesn’t she have the sweetest face you’ve ever seen?”  This has been the most precious love relationship which I have relished seeing on my visits over there.   Needless to say, I knew that Mom would be devastated to part from her little doggie when she left last week.  The plan is that once a month she will go back to the farm for a long weekend, and she's already talking about  her first visit, just so she can see Tina family.

When I was there, I had the idea to take pics of Tina so I could frame one and send it over for the new room.  Last week when I was rootling around in my sewing room, I ran across some June Tailor Sew-In Colorfast Fabric Sheets for an inkjet printer, and so my cogs started turning and instead a pillow idea started manifesting.   {You can never have enough pillows, right?}

I made a collage, printed it in black and white first – good idea because the 8.5x11 cut off the edges so I printed the 8x10 format on the fabric, sending off a breath prayer as it went through,  and yesss! it came out looking perfect.  Just a minor wrinkle that I was able to work around.  Following the instructions, I heat set the ink, and then washed and dried the print.  I sewed a border around the collage, log cabin style, and made some piping.  I'm not crazy about how busy it looks with the quilted border beside the collage.  If I had to do it over again, I'd definitely just use one fabric and a contrasting piping. Oh well!

It will be far cheaper for me to just send over the cover in a padded envelope and not make it into a pillow.  It so happens that there’s a material shop on the same street as my mom’s nursing home, so she can have a little activity to go over there and ask them make an insert.  

I’d so love to be a fly on the wall when she opens her present and sees Tina on the pillow.  {I hope it’s a comfort and not sad-making.}

I loved doing the photo collage. I've been doing some thinking! Since she doesn't have many surfaces in her room and therefore didn't take many photos, I may just have to make my mom a book tote bag and include grandchildren and great-grandchildren’s photos on it…like a brag bag.  That will be for another time.  She has her 88^th birthday coming up in October, but I need to do better about mailing it in plenty of time….