Grandma Willoughby

I have quite a few copies of old photographs of my grandparents, great-grandparents, a few great-great-grandparents ... and I've been trying to think of how to display them.  While I'm not sure I'll do this with everyone, I decided to work prints of the photos into pieces of fiber art.  And the first one is done!  I made a crazy quilt square from silk fabric I bought on my recent New England trip,  

added embroidery, beads, and vintage lace, and turned in the corners so it would fit in the oval frame I found.  Her photo in the middle was printed on silk printer fabric.







My great-grandmother Margaret McGrady Ybarra Willoughby was born in 1890 - her parents' seventh of eleven children and the first to be born in Montana after they came west from Virginia on an emigrant train.  She spent most of her life in and around Butte, where she married my great-grandfather Edward Ybarra.  He died in 1918 during the Spanish Flu epidemic, leaving her with a baby and a two year old.  Life was not easy - one can only imagine how hard it must've been to try and provide a living for my grandmother and her brother.  She married the man I knew as my great-grandfather ten years later.  I remember the wonderful pasties she cooked, her bathroom that smelled of Dove soap, and playing outside in her yard!  As a teenager studying history, I was amazed at how different the world and my life was from when Grandma was my age - cars, movie theaters, supermarkets, airplanes, television, space travel .... she saw so, so many changes.   Grandma passed on at age 94, outliving her children, both husbands, and all her siblings save for one sister.  And leaving loving memories for the rest of us!

Happy Creating!  Deborah