Here's 2 Ewe: In Memory of Eva te Bokkel

My mother-in-law was a very unique person. She was one of five children who, along with her parents, ate tulip bulbs during the hunger winter in the Second World War. This, along with other events in her life, made her a survivor. Despite a long battle with lupus and macular degeneration, she was determined to enjoy life. Lupus is an auto immune disease that can be very debilitating. But it was the gradual loss of her eyesight that was mom's biggest fear: to not see the colours of nature that she loved so much

As a child she was a dreamer, avid reader, and artist. She loved, and I mean, really loved colour. Mostly this was evident in her love for gardening, for the first crocuses in the spring, for the tulips, lilly of the valley, poppies, geraniums.... Most of her watercolour paintings are of landscapes or vases of flowers.

But mom also loved fibre crafts. One of these was weaving. When my sister-in-law, Helena, and I began to clean out her weaving stash, we were amazed at all the bins of yarns, all labled for colour and yarn thickness. Evidently mom had plans to do a lot of weaving.

One bin had an assortment of acrylic yarns that were, as our kids would say, 'Oma colours'. These were the pinks, blues, and greys that she herself loved so much to wear.

This past week I took that bin of colours and made a blanket in memory of my mother-in-law. I wove it on the 60" counterbalance loom that I inherited from her, remembering her as I wove with her yarns, in her colours, on her loom. The blanket is woven in a straight twill, but the colours are somewhat haphazard in accordance with the way that flowers in a meadow have no particular pattern. The blanket is for Helena, in memory of her mom.