Blue chambray work shirts with hand embroidery were all the rage in the early 1970s. Everybody had one! Or so it seemed to seventh-grade me.
My mom encouraged embroidery and other needlework, so she bought me lots of colors of embroidery floss and the correct kind of shirt. I vaguely remember working on it.
The other thing my mom encouraged was learning the names of garden flowers and wildflowers. So of course I chose flower motifs for embroidery: a pink daisy-like flower, a Firewheel or Gaillardia, a Bluebonnet, and orange-stemmed fantasy plant, a red tulip, a white daisy, and some Hat Flowers. Out of seven, that’s three Texas wildflowers. I drew them myself!
The butterflies were a finishing touch: two on the back and one on the front pocket. That pocket is destined to be part of a quilt someday.
