Piecing life back together, one scrap at a time: A grandmother’s lessons in resourcefulness

A few weeks ago, in the rubble of our house fire, I found the soggy quilt my grandmother made from scraps of clothes she’d sewn for me throughout my childhood.

My grandmother was a seamstress.

She made everything from wedding dresses with hundreds of hand-sewn pearls on long, frilly trains, to cheerleader uniforms with complicated red, white and blue pleats — and, on a more personal level, the majority of my dress clothes while I was growing up.

Some of my most delightful childhood memories happened in fabric stores, where I loved mixing prints and textures — and enjoy it still. For her, fabric stores were social outings. She would talk to the women who worked there, including a woman we called "Aunt Beatty," though I never understood how she was related to us. Meanwhile, I would wander