I am loving the sunshine today and thinking I need to finish the shirt I made of my mom.  She died when I was twelve and it took me years to deal with that.  Now that I have I want to honor her for inspiring me to stitch.  She was the one who taught me how to embroider.  I was supposed to be making those day of the week dischclothes for my hope chest (my father referred to it as my hopeless chest until I was 30!) but I never finished one single towel. 
In college I started patching peoples' jeans for them because we were all poor hippies who couldn't afford new jeans.  I discovered that I loved to sew and I loved playing with fabric.  I would go on Dea tour and people would give me their jeans in Minneapolis and I would sew them on the way to Alpine Valley in Wisconsin and then return them when we arrived.  No one had a pair that was like anyone else's.  I still do jeans today.  It wasn't what my mom had in mind when she taught me to hand sew but I use it all the time. 

I took a long sleeve black thermal knit shirt and decided to embellish it.  I used an old photo of my mom from the 40's and copied it onto iron on tranfer paper.  I ironed the image onto a piece of old cotton pillowcase that had been my mother's.  Probably from her own hope chest.  Then I hand sewed on a piece of vintage lace around the image.  After that I machine sewed the whole thing onto the black shirt.  It needs some color but I am waiting to be inspired before I add more embellishment.