Sweet Dreams, Baby Girl

While spending the past weekend with our daughter and her family, we celebrated her birthday and her husband’s.  After running across this post, I decided to put it up again.  Daughters are wonderful!! (But so are sons.)

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Monogram is Dazzle from OESD. Tthe floral design is from Brother’s Holiday Card #77. This is a beautiful collection, with a pretty companion design for this one.

With a teary eye for the quick passage of time and a proud heart for the woman she has become, I celebrated my daughter’s birthday by making this pair of pillowcases for her.  With these and the wonderful life she has made for herself,  I expect she will have sweet dreams.

The monogram is  Dazzle   from OESD.  It’s certainly convenient that she and her husband have the same initials.The floral design is from   Brother’s Holiday Card #77. This is a beautiful collection, with a pretty companion design for this one.

Luxurious bed linens have always been a priority for my girl.  As a freshman moving into a dorm at University of Florida, she asked me to custom make pima cotton sheets for the non-standard dorm bed, and, of course, matching pillowcases.    She confided that she was a bit like storybook character in the Princess and the Pea.  How could she get a decent night’s sleep on anything but pima cotton?  Oh dear, I thought.  Have I raised a “pima” donna?   But of course, two sets of fitted pima sheets were packed.

At  the airport, sending Claire, our French foreign exchange student,  home to France.  This was just a few days before Rebecca (in red) headed to University of Florida—along with her mama-made pima cotton bedding.

From the dormitory to the sorority house to her first college-girl apartment to her first little bachelorette house and now in her lovely marital home, she has always had pima cotton bedding.

I’m not very pleased with this pair of pillowcases, but time ran out so  this is what she got.  With two little ones, she doesn’t spend her time ironing.  So I used a polycotton gingham for the turn tube hem.  While pressing the pima, the iron rested a little too long on the gingham and shriveled a section, of course, in the center front!  FYI, that’s the top case with the covered hem.

The turn tube hem was done a little differently.  In an effort to segue from the elegant monogram and embroidery on the pima to the folksy gingham hem, I added a row of commercial entredeux between the two.  Then perle cotton was woven through the holes.  I’m not certain it was a successful transition, but it does offer a visual break.

Like mothers everywhere, I am astounded at how the time has passed.   The years since Rebecca’s birth have rushed by like train cars rolling down the tracks.

Rebecca, one day old, 9 lbs. 1 oz. I thought she was the most beautiful baby in the world. Isn’t it wonderful how God makes every mother think that?

She came home in a crocheted granny square blanket and a knitted gown that I had made during the pregnancy, hoping and praying for a healthy little girl with every stitch.  I got the my girl but not a little one.  My bouncing baby girl arrived weighing 9 lbs. 1 oz.

Three generations smocking the evening away during our stay at historic El Tovar at the Grand Canyon. My mother, 5 yo Rebecca and me.

She was just like a baby ordered from a catalogue–I got every feature I wanted.  Rebecca was smocking at 5, sewing at 6 and modeled for the cover of my Martha Pullen pattern, Rebecca’s Bow Dress.

She loved her smocked and heirloom clothes for church.

Rebecca wearing her peach Swiss batiste puffing heirloom Easter dress.

and for play.

Caught playing in the dirt excavated for our swimming pool. Her pink broadcloth romper smocked with ice cream cones did come clean. So did she.

At 10 she won Best in Show for sewing, first at the Volusia County Fair and then at the Central Florida Fair for this dress.   That certainly made her sewing mother proud.

She also made quilts, knitted, made porcelain dolls with her grandmother and did some heirloom sewing. An honor student, she was treasurer of her junior class and played on the volleyball team.

The summer  Rebecca was 15, she held week-long quilt camps (4 of them) for  girls–her brochure said students had to be younger than the teacher.  Twenty-four girls from 7-14 made their first quilts under Rebecca’s tutelage.

Rebecca, on the right, supervises the tying of one girl’s quilt while another group was at work in the dining room.

Then it was off to U of F.  She she spent one summer in Paris studying at The Sorbonne. After earning a degree in computer science, she went on to graduate school at Florida.

All these events, it seems, occurred last week.  Now she is Sadie, Sadie, Married Lady (remember Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl?).

Just like her mother, my daughter got the healthy children she hoped and prayed for.  Rebecca is an amazing, devoted mother to Alastair and Vivian Rose,  a wonderful wife for Harvey and the best daughter her parents could ever ask for.  Happy birthday,  Baby Girl.  May all your sweet dreams come true.