Heartsease

I’ve spent the last couple of days turning some patchwork blocks into a quilt top. I’d made the blocks by hand in class, the last of them has 2005 embroidered on it, I remember stitching it on the day of the London Tube Bombings on the 7th July. What I’ve done won’t win me any prizes. It was a rumpled rag-bag that I found, all wonky odd sizes, poor colour scheme, non-matching points. The most surprising thing about the work is the lavender colour scheme. It’s not a colour I have anywhere about the house, neither is it one of my favourites. As I stitched today, I puzzled over what had made me choose it, reluctantly attributing my poor health at the time to the poor choice of a feature fabric of lavender heartsease.


My Mum rang to talk to me about Nan’s armchair. It is a jazzy raiser recliner that I bought for my Nan at a time that she was so ill she couldn’t get up to walk to her bedroom. She used the chair to sleep in for several months while we tried to come to terms with the possibility that old ladies in their nineties may not need chairs for long. When I paid the bill, we talked as a family about how little use the chair might get. Five years on, and my Mum was ringing to say that the chair was broken and that she had replaced it with an ordinary fireside chair as Nan, long since back on her pins, no longer uses the rise or recline. We celebrated that Nan had confounded us and outlasted the chair.

It was then that I remembered that heartsease is my Nan’s favourite flower, and that I had chosen the soft colours with her in mind, hoping as I stitched that she might have use of the finished article. I have a week or so to get it done before I go down to visit, with the reasonable hope that although she is ninety-nine (and a half, she points out that if you are under ten and over ninety the halves are important) she will see another five years and wear it out.