Between 2008 and 2015, my mom kept a personal blog. This was separate from her art blog, and it’s where she wrote daily musings about her sewing, gardening, and baking projects; her foray into veganism; her and my dad’s travels and home improvement. Oh, and there was a lot written about her grandkids.

This is part of our 100 Things in 2017 challenge. Click on the photos for a closer look!

This is a really intimate glimpse into the mind of my mother, and now that she’s gone, it’s important to me to have a copy that I can pull down and flip through. So I did.

As it happens, we only barely rescued it; Google was about to delete it for inactivity when I started this project, and if I had waited even three more days to start, none of this would have been possible. The biggest struggle I faced with this project was finding a company to print the book. I ended up using Into Real Pages for this (back before their website broke), since they were the only service that could deliver such a large volume – breaking it into multiple books would have been too expensive, since I wanted to make 6 copies (one each for my dad and each of his children).

I spent a lot of time on this, tweaking layout and type and design to allow my mom’s voice and vision to live on. It was worth it. My dad bought all the books, and gave one to each of his children for Christmas, so now every household has this hefty chunk of Grandma Dorothy’s musings.