"Unfailing love"

"Let your unfailing love surround us, Lord, for our hope is in you alone." (Psalm 33:22)

I just love the phrase "unfailing love" - it crops up so often in the Psalms and gives me tremendous hope and encouragement! "Unfailing love" - something I would like to be able to say I offer to my loved ones, but fear it is no more humanly possible for me than for anyone else. (I love them without fail, but I don't always show it without fail) It is my goal, though, to try to remind folks of this unfailing love....that is there, waiting for us, waiting for us to open our hearts to be strengthened by it, to be filled with joy because of it.

We have had an absolutely beautiful weekend. A little holiday is a wonderful plus, too!

I finally managed to take a couple of pictures . . . a little thingy showing my first Dresden Plate attempt, thanks to the marvelous Darlene Zimmerman tool! Then there are a few of my current round of postcards. (hopefully if you click the picture you can read the postcard stitchery) (I have some done on bright lime green but haven't gotten them past the stitchery part and ready to mail yet)

The "realities of heaven"

I love this phrase from the NLT version of Colossians! Also..."let heaven fill your thoughts"...and "your real life is hidden with Christ in God". Powerful stuff here. These go along with John Eldredge's Epic, The Story God is Telling. God put eternity in our hearts, after all. We are just pilgrims. Aliens. Sojourners. I love the commercial for the cruise line where the passengers are treated like celebrities and after the cruise one guy adjusts the blinds in his office (for himself instead of having it done for him as on the cruise) and says, "I look at this as a temporary exile." Well, that's it. We're here temporarily as exiles. This is a foreign land and not our real home.

These are a few of the quilted postcards I've made...embroidery done by hand and small bit of quilting done by machine. These have enough time invested in them that they are for very special folks.

Time to get with it

Okay....time to get with it. If I'm going to follow someone, I'd better have something here so it doesn't look quite so stupid should anyone click on the doohickey shown when you follow someone's blog. And I happen to know some folks doing some pretty inspiring stuff right now and I want to encourage them. Everybody who's making efforts in good directions and letting it be known to provide help and encouragement for others deserves encouragement themselves.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
In the past I have let various things make me way too negative, and it has been my goal for some time now to become an encourager. I haven't yet figured out what I'm "supposed" to do or what my "gifts" might be (Ephesians 4:7.11-13,15-16), but I surely do figure at least I can offer up some encouragement to folks who are doing good things.
"so that the body of Christ may be built up"

And as my crazy cousin Anne says, "Onward and sideways!"

Wow! Had no idea it had been so long since I've posted! The Journey has indeed been busy and time flies when you're having fun (and even when you're not).

I showed the quilt for the school auction - well, I went from that to a special graduation quilt for our very, very special administrators - squares with written notes from each of the seniors and squares with their pictures and then squares with group pictures, the commencement announcement, etc. Above are some of the squares as the top was in progress. I managed to get the top put together to show them at graduation but now have to finish it. School colors are purple and gold, so I got a purple Fusions fabric for the strips between and will have a narrow gold Fusion fabric as an inner border and then more of the purple for the outer border. I want the focus to be the pictures - just want them nicely framed!

This year's wren eggs on the left and babies almost ready to fly on the right!

This is a little birth announcement quilt - obviously a tad late in getting finished. I messed up my original plans for birthing it and so will just use this red store-bought bias binding for it.

Hopefully I'll get back in the swing of things. I've got big plans, anyway!

Whew!!

Well, I've survived the little quilt for the school auction that wasn't going to be any trouble and also getting ready for and getting through Beth's marathon.

Whew!

The marathon was yesterday - the Country Music Marathon in Nashville - over 32,000 people raced(23,000 were doing the half-marathon) The heat was dreadful and the humidity made it worse. There were lots of ambulances zipping around, with runners being carried off in addition to all the folks who were treated at the multitude of medical stations at points over the course. It was really hard for me at times when I knew Beth was going slower than her planned pace and there were long periods when I didn't hear from her or know where she was. I could just imagine her in every ambulance I heard or saw. Many seasoned runners fell by the wayside or were much, much slower than their normal pace. For those of who live in the area, it was still almost an overnight change from late winter/spring weather to summer heat and humidity. For the first 11 miles all 32,000 were together, before the half-marathon folks split off to finish and the others went on for the full run. That meant extreme crowding for the runners - Nashville streets just can't accomodate so many folks! I'm so proud of my sweet baby who survived it all with a smile on her face and good spirits in spite of the difficulties.

This is the little quilt I made for the RCA fund-raising auction. It sounded like such a simple thing to do, and I guess it really is. I just seemed to have hiccups at various stages along the way, probably because I was trying to hurry. I dithered over whether or not to quilt inside the blocks of the children's artwork and finally decided against it. Their drawings were the whole point, anyway. I just quilted in the ditch around each drawing and then did 2 rows using a decorative machine quilting stitch on each sashing strip. Next time I'll have smaller blocks so the fullness won't be so noticeable. I DID press it again after this pciture and helped the appearance. And it brought $300, which tickled me no end. (I was just hoping it would bring $50 or somesuch!) The back was black with white polka dots. I tried various fabrics for borders including that one, but they all seemed to detract from the kids' artwork, which was the reason for the quilt in the first place. This quilt marked my first use of the popular jelly rolls - in the interest of time and straight strips, I bought a jelly roll for the sashing between the blocks. I loved using it!

Blessings: a daughter with the strength and faith to accomplish difficult goals, God to protect and bless her, this beautiful world we've been given, the sweet songs of birds in the early morning

Lilacs! Some of my most favorite flowers! And they smell SOOOO GOOOD!!!! An empty jar was just the handiest thing to grab to hold them, and the smell is so good I figured it didn't matter what they were in!

They graced our table for lunch yesterday. Beth and Joshua came home with us after church to eat lunch and then move on to the afternoon's activities. (Of course, they had to see what the Easter Bunny had left them here first...!) Evan went to the nursing home to stay with his mother for the afternoon, Joshua had computer stuff to do for a programming class, and Beth and I worked outside. Mowing, flower bed, etc. It was all great.

Today I had taken the day off, and I worked on a couple of small quilt projects...didn't get any pictures, though. Maybe tomorrow. Then this afternoon the sunshine called to me and I did a bit more in the flower beds. Got rained on and thundered over - it's just that weird time of year. Last Friday at work there was a tornado warning and we had to gather up all the patients and everybody and go to our designated safe places in the clinic building for a while.

Pillowcase with crocheted flowers and edging done by my great-grandmother. I always loved these dimensional roses and even as a child did not want them to be damaged. Isn't it funny how you sometimes feel about things when you're a kid? At a time when I normally didn't think about such things, I was always very careful with these pillowcases.

Block in baby quilt done for Evan by his grandmother....very pale because the floss colors were pastel anyway and have faded with years of washing and being hung on the line. I love that we have it. It has prairie point edging.

Blessings: family, items shared through generations of family, safety from weather disasters

A lovely day. Warm and breezy and redolent with the scent of lilacs. No hint of the storms and rain and cold temperatures to come.
Managed to take care of a few weekend chores while Evan was at the nursing home with his mother this afternoon. She's going downhill, and it's so sad. Her physical self is outlasting her mental self. For over a year, one of us has been there with her most of the time. Not that it's actually necessary, but she's always happier with someone there. (she always preferred to be surrounded by people) It is quite heart-breaking to see her always trying to check the pantry to make sure there's something to fix for everyone for supper and to make sure there are clean pillowslips for the guests and take care of other such things. She has always been the one to take care of everyone and feed everyone and she simply doesn't know what to do with herself not having those chores. It's getting to the point that she doesn't always know us, either. She somehow recognizes that we belong, but she mixes us up with folks long gone.
This tattered quilt below is one she gave us to use for packing material when moving years ago - Beth has had it over a chair in her room for a long time. Many of the blocks are just fine, and then some are tattered as you see here. Below is a hooked rug thing my mother worked on while recuperating from open heart surgery years ago. It looks much better than this picture, and is a great memory.

All in all, I am prompted to be mindful of and thankful for my many blessings. I don't deserve any of them, but oh, how I have been blessed with my family, Evan's family, friends, food and shelter beyond that of most of the world....on and on.

Blessed be the name of the Lord.