My sister is still in the hospital, but is now working with physical therapists to learn to walk, use utensils, swallow, get dressed, open toothpaste, etc. Just recently she has become “herself” again and is making lots of progress. She is now able to eat real food and hopefully will have the feeding tube out soon. She is still dependent upon supplemental oxygen.
Early on, when we realized that this was going to be a long term illness, we had the idea to make her an afghan. We put a call out for granny squares and soon packages started arriving at my home filled with all different colored grannys. Some people who couldn’t crochet asked others to make a square for them. They were all beautiful!
I had a surgery in mid May and was off work for 6 weeks so had time to start assembling the afghan. I looked up joining and finishing instructions online and got to work. It was challenging because they were all slightly different sizes and different types of yarn. I ended up adding an extra row of white to each square, which helped them become more uniform. I then joined the white edges together and finished off with a verigated border. I delivered it to her in late June. She couldn’t talk at that time but mouthed “thank you” and “I love it.” I read off the list of all who had contributed and both she and I are thankful to everyone who participated.
It turned out to be 5 x 7 feet and consisted of 130 individual granny squares. I’m somewhat proud of myself and this accomplishment because I didn’t know what I was doing when I got started. I also didn’t realize how much work it would be. I started to think about how much cross stitching I could be doing in that time off.
In the end I realized that since I cannot visit her very often (she is a 5 hour drive away), this was my way of being there.
Holly's Stitching & Stuff 