If you’ve been following along with me, you probably remember the Grandmother Project. After my maternal grandmother passed away almost a year ago, I inherited boxes and boxes of things (my entire dining room was filled) and spent a lot of time trying to make sense of them and put them to good use. I posted many times with photos of some of the more interesting finds and uses.
My paternal grandmother passed away several years ago, but there was recently a family pow-wow to divide up what remained of her belongings. Gram was not a woman of material wealth and didn’t leave much behind. I had nothing of hers though, so I was happy when my mom brought home some things for me. Today and tomorrow I’m going to share some of them with you.
My aunts say that this piece of lace was my grandmother’s parochial school collar from her uniform. It’s actually quite beautiful and is 23 inches long. I’m not sure what to do with it though! Any suggestions are welcome. I could frame it I suppose.
Lace collar
Next up is another collar, but this one is for a baby or child. And since it is 
blue, we think it must have been my father’s, or possibly the other son my grandmother had who died as a baby. I’m not sure what to do with this either! It’s an interesting piece of family history to have though.
These gloves are very tiny – I can’t get my hands into them at all and neither can Teen Martha ( I think we inherited a scaled down version of my mother’s giant paws), but Gram had very small hands. It’s possible these are from her wedding, although her hands are not visible in the wedding photo I
Gloves
have. They have tiny little pearls at the edge and are quite pretty, if a bit yellowed. Again, I’m at a loss as to what to do with them and the only thing I can come up with is framing them. I also am not sure how to get the yellowing out without damaging them. Any thoughts or suggestions for any of this is welcome!
Tune in tomorrow for another installment of this project.
You can follow any comment to this entry through the RSS 2.0 Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Oh man, I came here because I couldn’t wait to see the ideas other people had about what to do. Blah! I’m first. Oh well. I don’t have any ingenious ideas, except to maybe stuff the gloves with cotton and turn them into a stuffed animal. But that might ruin them. You could take these things and applicae (have no idea how to spell that!) to cloth and then sew the cloth pieces together into a Grandmother Quilt.
My suggestion would be either to create a shadow box where you could put a picture of your grandmother and then her things or to create a wall-hanging quilt to display the items. Beautiful pieces. This reminds me I have a lace placemat from my grandmother that’s collecting dust in a box in the cupboard.
Thanks!
Interesting idea – I have no skills to do such a thing unfortunately! It’s sort of hard to know what to do with things like this. They have meaning to me and I’m glad to have them, but I can’t really “use” them.
These things are so beautiful! They belong in a museum some day. I would find out how to preserve them, you know the way they suggest on Antiques Roadshow? I have a baptism dress my dad wore in 1902 somewhere, and need to preserve it. So, I should find this information out, too. I bet your grandkids and great grandkids will enjoy having you take them out for a show and tell some day in the future!
I love the idea of a shadow box…the gloves are so sweet.
I’ve got to figure it out! I’m also determined to at some point catalog all of these things, as well as my own items that have meaning to me so there will be no guessing by future generations about whose they were or what they were used for.
I agree with Alexandra that your grandma’s beautiful things belong in a museum some day!