Thankful Thursday

This is week three in our Thankful Thursday installments:

I am thankful for: Blankets

Random enough for you?  I've been thinking a lot about blankets in our life today as I worked with one wrapped around my feet and found that I am so thankful for them.  I, of course, am a scrapbooker, but most of the women before me in our family made/make blankets, including my Mom and Sister.  The majority are quilts.  Quilts filled with love and fabrics that are part of our family story.  The blankets I use most at my house are quilts made of my old t-shirts from college and another made of flannel taken from my Mom, Dad's and Brother's clothes (my sister was a teenager when this was made and refused to contribute).  The later is particularly poignant just now as I remember my Dad as I touch the flannel.  My mom made both quilts and gave me the flannel one for college graduation.  It was a little funny that day as it was so incredibly hot that we all almost had a heat stroke, but it is very special to me.  

My kids, as everyone knows, are blanket obsessed too.  B still sleeps with the blue blanket Zach's Mom (Amy) sent him as a baby.  It was so fluffly, soft and blue then.  Now, despite frequent washings it is much less so.  It has a hole where it had to be cut off his finger.  It is terribly loved.  We attempted with M to get her to bond with two blankets so we didn't have to take one everywhere.  She has, however, chosen her favorite that we now take to and from Ms. Courtney's house daily.  It is the multi-hued pastel blanket my sister crocheted for her.  She does also sleep at night with the pink blanket Amy made, but the purple Aunt Audra blanket is her true love.

I have other special quilts around too.  For instance, my Grandma Dotter, just before she died, gave me a patriotic red, white and blue blanket that she made in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial as her congratulations for graduating law school.  It is gorgeous and was, I believe, on a magazine cover of some kind. B has an amazing postage stamp quilt that my mom painstakingly made for him incorporating Oklahoma history as he was born in its centennial year.  I have a blanket that Anna Jo, one of my college roomies, made for me when I got married.  We use it often in the summer and love that it is made of fabrics I picked and that she took the time do make it for us.  We have blankets for each of our kids made by Chrissie and another for Maggie tied by Sarah and her mom.  I even have one quilt I made in grade school at summer camp.  

We have more crocheted by Audra and many others made by family friends and a soft white one that Grammy gave B, but that M has used much more. (M has a huge hamper full in her room that keeps most of the kid blankets together).  We have two precious quilts made by my maternal and paternal great-grandmothers that are, for now, carefully in my cedar chest.  The yellow one made for me by a woman I never got to meet, but who was eagerly anticipating my birth.  The pink one, that I used frequently in college, was made by a sweet lovely woman named Harriet that was my Grandma Dotter's mother.  I have memories of her and pictures of us together in the short time we shared this space.   My mother has dozens more blankets from both sides of our family as well as ones that she has made.

I love and am thankful for our blankets at their most basic because they keep my family warm. They also, however, keep us feeling safe and keep us wrapped in our family's story which makes them doubly wonderful.  I am so thankful for them on all counts.