Longing for Spring

Every day I am grateful to be able to wake up in a warm house, to be able to come home from a hard day's work to a warm house, not to have buy, chop or carry in wood or carry out the ashes.  Still, I'm so hypothyroid that winter invariably seems not only dark, but also long and cold. If my little house were a little bigger, I'd be forcing tulip bulbs in every room.
I'm trying to discipline myself to work on some that have already been around for over 50 years.
This quilt top was pieced by my niece's paternal grandmother, who, like my own paternal grandmother, died decades before our births.  I know Grandma Roberts was older when she married and died when her only son was only six or seven.  Her widower passed away a couple of years later.
I love this quilt top, not only for the great variety of fabrics in the tulips, relentlessly blooming in perfectly spaced rows, but also for the fact that she appliqued these by machine and then went back and applied buttonhole stitch with black embroidery floss along every edge.  I'm sure this must be the result of evening stitching for much more than one cold winter. And I do remember how in the area where she lived there was so much snow that it was not uncommon for the depth of snow on the sides of the plowed roads to be greater than the height of the school buses!
This quilt has no border, but I'm going to add one or two from a couple of reproduction fabrics so it will be big enough for my niece's bed.  I've yet to decide how to quilt these blocks to best advantage.
These lovely rows of tulips speak not only of the promise of this spring but of the springs of the last fifty or sixty years--even the ones they never saw because someone had shut them away in a box somewhere.