My grandma was great at needlework. Whenever I damaged W. by showing her too much affection, she would take care of her in the sweetest ways.
Once I accidently ripped off W.'s favourite arm while taking a nap in Grandma's bed. She came in and hugged me to calm me down, and when she left again, I put W. aside and took only her arm to sniff on it until I fell asleep. These days, I interpret this habit of sniffing W.'s arm as an early form of meditation, regulating my breathing and focussing fully on it. I was reckless whenever that arm was nearby.

Grandma had lost most of her eyesight by her mid-eighties. She had either green or grey Star, and once she explained it to me as being blind in the center of her eye, and the corners would show mostly outlines and barely any colour. Still, she sewed the whole family's stuff until the very end, which was, however, not determined by her loss of sight but of memory. She repaired W. for me until she forgot who I was.

One day, I sat with Grandma for lunch and had a simple conversation with her. She asked me who I was and what I was doing, and I told her that I was aspiring to become an artist. Her face lightened up and she told me that when she was my age, she dreamt of becoming a fashion designer. She loved drawing, but after the war, she had to do something real to make money. In fact, for many years she produced umbe-rellas together with my grandpa.
I asked my aunt for the drawings, but apparently, they got lost decades ago.

Whenever I look at W., I see the pale pink thread my Grandma used to sew together W.'s back. And on my favourite arm she installed this dark blue patch which frankly made me quite mad when I first saw it, because the arm was attached to the green part, not the blue. Today I realized that she probably either didn't give a fuck, which would be fair I think, or, more likely, couldn't distinguish between the colours.

I also have these folds between my nose and mouth which have been quite prominent since I was a child and make me look a bit like a puppet. I used to hate them, but I figured that whenever I look in the mirror, I have a reason to think about my beautiful grandma, which is quite epic eventually.