Sixteen comments

Yesterday I wrote a blog, and then was totally amazed by the comments coming in. Most of them from old friends whose names I recognized. Even the Anonymous were old friends. 

I will publish a picture when the pillow comes back from the upholsterer. Carol told of learning the tvist in Japan when she was a child. An Anonymous described perfectly what the tvist is. I call it a one and a half cross stitch. If you are interested in how I got these old old kits with the pattern and the yarn (wool) I will tell you. 

When Jane, one of my favorite daughters, was about to get married, she wanted to go to Sweden to see if she could buy her wedding dress there. She pleaded with me to go along with her. I tried to tell her to go alone and for her to kick up her heels and have a huge fling before getting married. Nothing doing. She wanted me for extra security. When the plane landed in 

Copenhagen Ingegerd Dolling picked us up and on the ferry from Helsingor (where Hamlet used to hang around) to Helsingborg, Ingegerd told us that my mother was in the hospital in Helsingborg and we should go to see her when the ferry landed in Sweden. My mother had some kind of heart trouble.

When we got to see her, she seemed happy to see Jane and asked her what she was going to do. When she heard she was looking for a wedding dress my mother said ' You can have mine' I never knew she had a wedding dress. We had never seen a picture of her in a wedding dress. So out came the sad story of how my parents were married. You may remember that they had met in New York where my mother was working as a Nanny. My father was the Captain on a Swedish freighter unloading in the harbor. He was visiting a brother of who lived on Long Island. Nils and Blenda fell in love, he proposed marriage a year later, she said if you feel the same a year from now, I will say yes. So a year later they were engaged and then Blenda needed another year to get her trousou (sp) ready. She went back to Sweden and sewed her own wedding dress. In 1914 when War broke out between Germany and England Father said one day, 'we have to get married now, for my ship will not come into these waters again until after the war. So they were married in a court house, she in a brown suit and Father in his plain suit and they did not see each other until sometime in 1915 when Mother managed to get to England (or was it Spain) when she got pregnant with Birgit who was born in 1916.

Mother got home from the hospital and found her wedding dress which was beautiful. Fitted Jane to perfection. She was elated. And then she decided to travel around Sweden before our plane flew us back to USA. On this trip of her own she found these kits of tvist which she sent me when I moved into my present home. She knew she would never have time to make them.