Generations

This picture has been a source of great joy for my family for many years. It's a photo of my dad's family at my mom and dad's wedding. His two sisters, their husbands, and my grandparents (his parents) posed for this family portrait and it is hilarious. My mom calls them The Hatfields. The story goes that the photographer told them to "welcome your new sister in law into the family" immediately before snapping the picture. Perhaps it was his way of eliciting a candid shot? Perhaps it is one of those pieces of family lore, a story concocted after the fact to try to account for the faces these people are making? Everybody involved claims it's true.

I made this pillow by printing the photo onto fabric paper and creating the pillow front using the exact same process I detailed here for making the ornaments. Then I made an overlapping back for the pillow, attached it to the photo patch for the front, and stuffed it with a very cheap pillow form I had on hand from a previous Ikea trip.

I just knew that my grandma would love this gift, and she did. It's been displayed on her bed practically since the moment she opened it.

What I hadn't anticipated, whatsoever, was how fascinating the picture would be for the sons of my cousins. Grown men themselves now, freshly married or new to fatherhood, they passed the pillow among themselves, pointing and talking softly.

It's funny, because for my generation, and the generation in the picture, this photo is a well-known hilarity. For these young men, in their early twenties, it was a brand new experience. Grinning back at them from the past were their own grandparents...their grandmas looking foxy and hip with beehive hair dos and glossy red lips. Their grandfathers looking dashing and rebellious, smirking at the camera with a possessive paw on grandma's hip.

It was such a precious moment, watching them reconcile these images with the adoring, doting folks they know as grandparents. They met these people as they were already entering into their "golden years"!