One day last week my granddaughter came running to me when I stopped off at her home. Apparently she had just had a little altercation with her parents after they had forbidden her to drag her pillow and the  appliqued giraffe bedspread from her bed to lie on the floor under while she watched Mommy cook.  Don’t ask why she would want to do that. She’s three years old.

She looked up at me with tears welling in her brown eyes and said,

“Grandma, will you make me a quilt that won’t be too big to carry around the house and play with?”

How do you say no to a little girl with tears in her eyes, or that you have so much to do between now and Christmas you can’t stop everything to make quilts? I have a lap quilt I keep on a chair in my living room made with squares of animal and other novelty fabrics sewn together and quilted by machine that she loves to play with when she visits.

She’d asked several times if she could have it, but I always ask her to let me keep it so it would be there for her to play with any time she visited. I would gladly have given it to her but didn’t want to encourage her to think she could take things home from any house she visits, but I did vaguely promise to make her one of her own some day when I had more time.

Well, it looked like someday had slipped up on me. So what else can a grandma do? Well, she can say:

“Of course I’ll make you a quilt, Sweetie. Do you want animals on it?”

“I want it to have giraffes!” she said.  “And I want it to be pink.”

And of course she wanted it in five minutes, but somehow I put her off and told her I would buy the stuff to make it and bring it to her as soon as it was finished, but it would take some time because I had a lot to do.

Well, Hubby and I discussed it later and decided that if Grandma makes a special quilt for the 3-year-old granddaughter, then the 6-year-old grandson will ask why I didn’t make him something special too.

So I shopped for the fabric around the Mother Nature’s snowstorms and other obligations, and finally, yesterday I got all the materials needed and began to plan, not one but two, lap quilts that absolutely have to be ready by Christmas.

Hers will be giraffe themed with pink incorporated somehow. His will be Darth Vader and Star Wars, a masculine black and red. Hers will feature photographs of giraffes printed on fabric squares, his will have a  photograph of him in his Darth Vader mask printed on fabric and appliqued to the quilt front, with a row of mini-photos in a border. IF all goes well. And all this will be done before Christmas. And there’ll be child-sized pillows to match.

That’s what I’m doing this week instead of cleaning the bathrooms, or doing the laundry, or cooking Christmas treats, or posting or visiting my favorite blogs. But what else can a Grandma do? I’m a sucker for little girls with big brown eyes filled with tears. And besides, I like doing stuff like that. So I’ll see you all soon. Just as soon as everything gets done. And–if they turn out half decent–I may post a picture on line one day soon.