Cleaning Out Mother's House, Part 2

We worked for about five hours today, and my sister and I plan to go back later this evening for a few more hours. We think we have finally collected all of Mother's original art work into one central location. We'll each select things that we want, and the rest will go to the storage facility. We have also gone through almost all of the linens (Dan says there are more in the sewing room closet and probably in the front bedroom) and divided those into things that need to go into the trash, things that need to be donated, things that I am going to bring to my house, things that my sister is going to bring to her house, and items that are up for grabs or will go into storage. We threw out all the old blankets and pillows, and only kept the embroidered pillowcases. My sister is taking one of the velveteen quilts (I'll get the other or put it into storage) and the Sunbonnet Baby quilt. I'm taking the quilt with the tulips (pattern name?) and the Martha Washington spread...at least for now.

We moved a mattress and box springs to the street, along with a lot of other unwanted furniture items and four old typewriters. By the time we left for home, the only things left were the duct-tape encrusted office chair, the 1960s television, and the mattress and springs. One man filled up the back of his pickup truck, and said he'd be back. I hope he made it back before all the good stuff got gone. My sister mentioned to one of our teenaged helpers (he was new today) that my dad had picked up a lot of this stuff on the side of the road, and that it was going back to where it belonged. He laughed and said that his mother liked to pick up things, too.

Amanda says we should do an art exhibit with Mother's work. She did use a range of media--oil, watercolor, artist's crayon (pastels), pen and ink, and there are also some rather interesting pictures done with shells on wooden plaques (a roadrunner and an owl). She also did some pictures in which she drew and painted a picture (animals in this case) on canvas, then cut it out and glued it to a wooden background, which she embellished with other bits and pieces of wood. I didn't remember her working on those, but Amanda did. Mother was quite prolific in her output, which makes me begin to understand my great number of scrapbooks that I have either already completed or that I have planned for the future.