- Oh snap! Or, you learn something new every day

The first two-page spread of Close Your Eyes 2 is done, A-sides ...

and B-sides ...

As you can see by the color quality, it's a gray day here, but that plus Don's willingness to do the shopping left me plenty of time for stitching.

The front cover came first, with Roy G Biv colors for Griffin, who just learned red + yellow = orange (his favorite color) ...

Then I turned to the B-side, with a second title still undecided:

• Two Sides to Every Story?
• Every Picture Tells a Story?
• Both Sides Now?
• The Inside Story?
• Or, or, or ... what?

Here's what ultimately flowed out of the Pitt pen onto the the verso of the title page ...

After which I ladder stitched the cover to the first page along what will become the spine.

And as I prepared to sew the snaps onto the corners, I realized I had no clue about how to proceed. None!

Fortunately, there were Instructions for Attaching ...

Which I'm quite sure Don's Nana never bothered to read. How silly it would have seemed to her ... everyone knows how to sew on a snap, right? Not anymore!

And as I stitched each fiddly piece, there was no "Aha!" moment of recollection, no muscle memory ... the task was totally new to me. Cora Inman Ackert surely would have shaken her head over that, but hopefully she would have approved the final product, as I always admired her and valued her opinion ...

Coda: Don's Nana passed away over thirty years ago, shortly after her great-granddaughter Meg was born. I think these pictures in her button box may be of Cora and her parents (although I'm not sure, there are no notes on the back) ...

The things we leave behind ...

If that's true, then the woman in the pictures would be Don's great-grandmother, my daughters' great-great-grandmother and my grandkids' great-great-great grandmother.

Though her name is lost in time, a small scrap of her story is now stitched into mine ...