What We Do for Love

Edited to add the promised photos. I promise to edit this later to add photos, because it will make more sense with photos than it does right now - but here's the story anyway! Yesterday morning The Princess calls to ask if I will help her cut the backing fabric for the duvet cover she has been working on for months! Of course, I say, bring all your stuff over. She arrives, front, extra front border fabric that hasn't been added yet, and duvet in hand. I'm cooking breakfast, so first we eat. Then I get hubby off to work - he has to go in to work on a friend's car. Then we move the dining room table to get a large expanse of open floor. Then we have to clean all the dog hair up. Finally she lays her duvet on the dining room floor and puts the tiny little section of patchwork (again, remember she's been working on this for months) in the center of her duvet. Next she pulls out some lovely chocolate brown home dec fabric that is to be the borders for the patchwork. Well - there isn't enough! She needed about 3 yards, and she bought a yard. By now it's noon and she has to be to work at 1. We jump in my car and race to JoAnn Fabrics where she originally bought the border fabric. Of course, they don't have it any longer. But they do have another textured fabric in the same color and it's on sale for $5/yard. This will work she says and I love that the textures are different. This will just add to the "Eclectic" feel I'm going for on the front! I drop her off at work and head home. Once again I measure for the borders, after clarifying if she wanted to put the top and bottom on first, then the sides, or the sides and then the top & bottom. As I'm putting the top and bottom borders on her piece of patchwork, I notice that the seams on some of the patchwork are coming apart. This patchwork is done with all different types of fabrics, different weights, etc. Some are quite ravelly and The Princess is afraid of the serger. So, I went through her patchwork piece and made sure all the seams were sound and were going to say intact. This is important because the Summer before she started 9th grade she made a great Navy Blue skirt to wear on the first day of school. This fabric was a very ravelly peachskin silky. She put a lovely embroidery on the front on the skirt and installed the best invisible zipper I have ever seen - not one bubble or bump! Keep in mind that she is afraid of the serger and wouldn't let me do anything on this project! I believe she was 15 or 16 at the time! Well she wore that skirt to school on her first day of high school and you can just guess what happened. Yep! The seams shredded - by the time she was halfway through the day the only thing holding her skirt together was basically the backstitching! She had a jacket that she tied around her waist and nobody knew, but she did. She has refused to make a stitch of clothing since then! Oh she's design it. She'll buy the fabric for it. She'll even wear it, but she won't make it! I couldn't let this happen to her again - so I secretly reinforced all the stitching lines :)