A Red Poppy for Memorial Day

After yesterday's sorrowful poppy discovery, imagine the thrill I felt when I woke up this morning and looked out the window to see this:

It's almost as if it was waiting for Memorial Day to arrive. The significance of the first bloom on a red poppy on this day isn't lost to me. I went in search of some information about how red poppies came to be associated with Memorial Day, and I found this article. Interesting.

Yesterday, I went out to clip off the rotten bud. While I was there, I took a picture of this one, which appeared to be the next most likely to bloom. You can see that it hasn't even begun to open, and so I expected to wait another several days.

It's truly an incredible flower. The red is so bright that I've had to back off on the saturation in Photoshop to avoid losing the details.

It's just a little shy and not yet fully opened. I expect it will open all the way as the temperatures rise with the sun.

Yesterday I had some cooking to do. I baked a loaf of bread and made two salads for our Memorial Day get-together with Erik and Mae this afternoon. Looking forward to that. I was able to make my way into the sewing room in the afternoon, however, and I cut the remaining pieces for the Guatemala quilt. (I'm going to have to think of a better name for it.)

Now it's just a matter of sewing everything together. I wanted to finish the cutting so that I could fold up the fabric and set it aside. I needed to make way for the next block for the Dancing Chickens and Flying Pigs quilt. These are so cute.

All the applique is fused and top-stitched, and it's ready for hand embroidery. The little quilt is made from individual pieces, each fused individually. I stitched around the edge with the usual blanket stitch, but I wanted the interior seams to be suggestive of a crazy quilt.

For that I used Stitch #308 on my Bernina 750QE machine, but I needed to make the stitch both shorter and narrower, and so I turned the width and length settings down about halfway.

And that took almost all the rest of the afternoon. This being Monday, I'm linking up to:

This morning, I'll spend some time slow stitching on the barn. I expect to finish that today, and then I hope to get at least a little more sewing done on the Guatemala quilt. I'd really like to have that into a finished quilt top by Friday. Also, I'm one block behind on the Tiny Tuesday blocks, and a new one will come out this Tuesday. I'll probably wait until then and do both at the same time.

For now... Happy Memorial Day, everybody. I grew up in a military family. My grandfather was a WWI veteran. My father was a WWII and Vietnam veteran. Our family was fortunate to have never lost anyone on the battlefield, but we knew many families that were not so lucky. While we remember our heroes lost on the battlefield, I want to acknowledge one of the unsung heroes with this picture of my mother, a championship military wife. In this picture, she's getting ready to make breakfast for our family in one of our many treks back and forth across the country.

She was the glue that held our military family together. She didn't serve in the military, but she kept the home fires burning while my father deployed for years at a time to serve his country in far-off places. It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a military wife to raise a military family. Here's to you, Mom. Gone, but never forgotten.