thoughts of mom & my acrylic heirloom

This is a cardigan my mom knit when she was pregnant with me. It's made out of bad 60's acrylic with ugly plastic buttons she replaced probably in the 80's; I seem to remember pretty glass buttons when I was very young. I always liked the gradient browns and the picot collar, I always hated the yarn but it's one of my most cherished possessions.

My mom was not a sentimental woman. She was not the type of woman who would gingerly wrap a beautiful woolen hand knit in lavender scented tissue paper placing it in a clear bag zipped up against moths saving it for one of her 6 daughters to wear when she turned 16 or some other milestone number. No mine was the type to pull out a refrigerator box full of clothes twice a year, spring & fall and make you try on anything in the box that might fit you for the next 6 months; and if there happened to be a sweater in there that she knit for herself when she was a young woman that by now could fit you as a 6 year old, well then darling there's your heirloom. By the time I got the sweater my mom is wearing in the picture of her with skis it was a stiff felted mass with no redeeming qualities except she knit it. I'm sure she tossed it away against our wishes saying as she would say to me now still holding onto this brown sweater, "What do you want with that old rag?! Get rid of it!" But it was hers, she knit it and I can feel closer to her while wearing it.

This picture is my mom in her wedding dress which I'm sure she made because if she could make it for cheaper than buying it she would. I always loved this dress and the fact that it was a pale blue worn with a vibrant red overcoat, but I included it because when I said unsentimental... a week after my mom's wedding she gave this fantastic dress to a church rummage sale! I remember asking her why and as usual, "why would you want that old thing?"