Project 365: Week 10

My how the weeks fly by!  We had colds, and then asthma, and other odd illnesses.  I guess that is the nature of children, and especially a lot of children!  This is for the week of March 6 - 12.

Sunday: I had to stay home from church again, but I got to see these too play together!  I am thankful for sibling love.  Watching the relationship between my different children is wonderful.  They each play with others in different ways and enjoy the interactions they have.

Monday:  Sophia wanted to read to Mercy.  I am thankful for Sophia learning to read!  What a wonderful world reading opens up to us!  I love Mercy being goofy and Sophia being crazy.  These two are quite the pair.

Tuesday:  I have taken many pictures of this tree.  It is outside of Keira's speech therapy.  I have enjoyed watching it change and blossom.  I am thankful for Keira's speech therapist.  She is working with Keira on several sounds, and Keira is improving all the time!

Wednesday:  I missed Wednesday.  Going back, I am not even sure what I was doing or why I missed it!  Oh, well.  This picture is from Thursday.  Megan and I took pictures of a quilt that we made together for a friend who is having her first baby.  I almost like the back better than the front!  The red is a nice rich color and the variegated thread just makes the back iridescent!  I am thankful for being able to learn how to sew and quilt and to be able to use my skill to make pretty things for my family and friends.

Thursday: The kids love to jump on their trampoline.  I asked Keira to see if she could bring her knees up while jumping.  She did a great job, and made funny faces!  I am thankful for Keira's many silly faces, and that she loves to make them!

Friday: Megan and I went to a quilt show.  I was disappointed overall!  Megan and I went to the same show about 6 years ago, and I remember more booths and more modern fabrics.  This time, it seemed to be several booths selling fat quarters all sorted by color and the rest of the booths selling sewing machines, notions, or patterns.  I was really hoping to see some of the new fabric lines in person and possibly some interests quilts on display.  We saw the quilts that were a part of the contests, but weren't real enthusiastic about them.  Probably 90% or more were appliqued, which I am not really interested in.  But as we wandered around the booths, we saw more quilts that we did like.  The picture for today is the favorite quilt that Megan and I saw.  I may try to figure out how to make it as I love the colors and the design.
I am thankful for learning and growing.  I pray that I know more tomorrow than I know today, and that the Lord sanctifies me more and more each day.

Saturday: I planted a little bush in a bonsai pot.  We will see where this goes, but I look forward to seeing if I can help this little plant grow and thrive in a pot.  I also have hope that I can plant a few more in the next few days.  I am thankful for God's nature and this small opportunity to take dominion of this little bush!

Sewing: February

To review, I started three projects this year in the sewing department: Mercy's quilt, the #mightylucky quilting club, and Dr. Seuss wonky stars.

I am really pleased to say that I not only finished Mercy's quilt top, but I also finished the back!  I am amazed at how fast it came together and I still can't get over how awesome it looks.  The pattern is wonderful, and I really want to make another one for my bed.  Maybe some time, but not right now.

One of the rows, I really liked the curves so close together.

The top is finished!

The colors from the front with the color that will be the background for Mercy's name.  The background color is from the main quilt backing fabric.

Here you can see Mercy's name panel.  I really wanted to do something with serifs, so I looked up a bunch of different fonts and picked one that I liked.  Then I used that as a guide for how I would make each letter look.  Needless to say, the letters don't look much like the font, but it still gave me ideas on where and how to make the serifs and how big to make the letters.  I really love how wonky these letters are.

The finished back!

A close up of the main backing fabric.  I don't think I could have found a more perfect fabric!

I didn't do anything for the Mighty Lucky Quilting Club this month.  I was really hoping to finish Mercy's quilt in time for her birthday, so I focused on that completely until I couldn't do any more on my own.  (Technically I could have basted it on my own, but I didn't want to!)  I put together some fabric at the beginning of March for February's challenge, and hopefully I can do February's and March's in March and get caught up.

I did make some wonky stars while I was sick and couldn't baste Mercy's quilt.  The stars came together so quickly that I just kept making more and more!  Before I knew it, all sixteen were finished.  I had been planning to leave the quilt top like this, but I had some small pieces left over.  I thought I'd use them on the back, but I changed my mind and decided to make a piano key border. I don't want to waste any of this fabric, so I'm excited about the idea for the border, though it will add a bit of time before the top is complete.

In addition to all that sewing, Megan and I completed two small quilt tops and backs during our Thursday sewing time.  We each took one home to quilt and now all that is left for each is to sew on the binding.

A friend took this picture of me while I was sewing at the church.  Patrick had been fussy, so he was in the backpack.  He likes to be there, and I like being able to get things done while having him close.

This little pink quilt was made and basted all in one day.  I had all the strips of fabric prepared from making two other quilts with these fabrics.  The first quilt with these fabrics was Mercy's baby quilt.  We also make the binding on the same day!
Preparing to baste quilt number 1.

The binding for this little pink quilt is VERY scrappy.  Check out how small some of these pieces are!

The finished binding for the little pink quilt.

This little quilt was made from leftovers from Kyle's bed size quilt.  I love the fabric line because it has gears, circuit boards, flying cars, and robots.  This quilt took longer to put together because we didn't have a lot of any fabric, so we had to piece lots of bits to make each block and then we wanted to make it asymmetrical, so we added more bits to each grouping and sewed them together into the top.

You can see how many little pieces there are in this section of the quilt.

The two little quilts together, waiting to be quilted.  Megan and I were both quilting them at the church when my sewing machine broke!  Fortunately, my handy husband was able to fix it a couple of days later, and it back to working again.

 An close up of the quiling.  Loops seems fitting with the trail from the flying cars.

Project 365: Week 9

This week has seen us still sick.  We seem to be getting better, but not fully over the cough we have.  It was another week with many things to do and unexpected challenges, but through it all the Lord is faithful and good.  This post is for the week of February 28 - March 5.


Sunday: As often happens, I did not take a picture on Sunday.  We all stayed home from church as we all have a cough.  It was a restful day even though we were all not feeling our best.
This picture is from Friday when I took my camera to the chiropractor. He have a beautiful garden in the back and beautiful flower beds in the front.  As I was leaving the chiropractor's, I thought I'd take a picture of a couple of daffodils, but I ended up liking their shadow better!
I don't know if it is just me or if all people are like me, but I didn't really start to notice different types of flowers until the last several years.  I feel like a grew up oblivious to the small colorful beauties all around me.  Now I almost think of it as a game to see if I can find some bit of color where ever I am.  I am grateful to the Lord for opening my eyes to another aspect of his creation and how beautifully he designed his world!

Monday: LEAP DAY!!!  Last leap day, we made a time capsule package.  Avalyn was the most excited about opening it up and seeing what we had written.  But with dentist appointments in the morning, we didn't get to our Leap Day activities until the afternoon.  I had all the kids fill out an about me page and a couple of other printables to put into a new time capsule.  Then we measured heights and weights and hands and put everything into a new package.  After that we opened the old capsule.  The last Leap Day, Kyle was 3, just a bit older than Mercy is now!  We were also a family of 6!  We all enjoyed seeing how much the children had grown and changed, and now we can anticipate the next Leap Day and see how the Lord has blessed us through the next 4 years.
 I am thankful for planning ahead!  I am terrible at making a plan and following it.  I am working on that, but in this circumstance, I remembered and planned and we all enjoyed the results.

Tuesday: Patrick found the pots and pans!  He had a great time playing in the cabinet with all the pots and pans.  I am thankful for small joys.  This little guy shows us the world through eyes that are astonished at everything.  It is a pleasure to enjoy the world with him.

Wednesday: Keira, Sophia, and Mercy set up the blocks as a track for their cars.  Keira even made a little arch for her cars to go through.   I am thankful for the kids playing together.  There are many days where the kids argue and fuss until all I want to do is put them each in their own room.  But often, they play together well enjoying the thoughts and creativity of the others.  I love seeing how they feed off each other in creative ways.

Thursday:  I took two of the kids to school, but I returned home with the others to rest a bit and to keep our coughing kids away from other children.  At the end of the day, I grabbed some fabric to through together something for the February challenge for the #mightylucky quilting club.  I couldn't figure out how to make a collage easily in gimp, so here are three pictures of what I was playing with.  The last picture is more like what I will sew together.  The challenge is called minimalist improv.  Do these colors and layout bring anything to mind?  I want to know if you see what I see.
I am thankful for challenges that help me learn new things.  I wish I saw all of life this way, but the Lord is not through with me yet.  So hopefully I can apply this lesson to my life more gracefully than I have in the past.

 Friday: Patrick seems to have taken an interest in cruising around the furniture and pushing our chairs around the kitchen.  We decided to give him our little shopping cart to push.  We have used this for all of our children to learn to walk, and like the others, he loved it!  Every picture I took of him, he had his mouth open "talking" and squealing with delight!  Oh, the delight on his face!  I am so thankful for that!

Saturday:  Megan and I had been planning to baste Mercy's quilt at the church a week ago Thursday while the kids were in classes.  I didn't feel well that day, so the quilt just sat waiting.  I had hoped to baste it this past Thursday, but again, didn't stay at the church during classes, and interestingly enough, neither did Megan.  Adrian offered to help me baste the quilt, so we laid it out in the dining room on  Saturday to baste it.  This quilt is HUGE!  It filled almost the whole room.  But I still love it as much as ever, and I look forward to quilting it.  I took a couple of sets of us basting the quilt, but as is typical, I couldn't stop making faces at the camera.  This picture is my favorite, even though neither of us are fully in the frame.  In it, I had decided to attack Adrian and see if I could knock him over.  Since he was already kneeling, I didn't get very far!
 I am thankful for my husband supporting me in my hobby and helping with a big task like basting this giant of a quilt!

Smith Plantation

We took a step back in time at the Smith Plantation.  Located beside Roswell City Hall, you move from present day government buildings to a plantation home build in the 1840s.  It is nestled among large trees and other landscaping, giving you the feeling that you have escaped back in time, until you hear the loud sirens of fire trucks rushing past on the main road not too far away!

These are pictures of three generations of Smiths.  Unfortunately, the family ended as none of last generation had children.

Though cotton is usually thought of as the cash crop of the south, the Smiths only had about 10% of their land seeded in cotton.  The rest was used for whatever they could get to grow!

The parlor.  The Smith entertained with music and cards.

One of the Smith sons, "Willie", died of dysentery during the War Between the States.  His parents never unpacked his chest, and just placed it in the attic.  It wasn't rediscovered for over 100 years!

Part of the formal dinning room.  I am amazed at the large table.  We need one in our home!

The Smith daughters' bedroom with the "necessary" chair beside the bed.  

There was a series of painting hung on the wall going up the stairs.  They were all painted by Arthur Smith.  If I understood correctly, that was the first Arthur.

This is the parson's room.  The room was left open for travelling preachers.   The only cost for the preacher to stay was sharing any news from the rest of the world. 

We had wanted to have the tour with our friend, Amy, but she did not do our tour.  We still got to talk for a few minutes and see her dressed in her hoop skirt!

After touring the house, we spent some time in the cook house.  The kids got to make corn husk dolls!

We had a great time at the Smith Plantation.  We didn't get a chance to see all that they have to see, so we hope to go back again to tour the grounds.

Project 365: Week 8

Hey, do you know what?!  I am actually doing this post on time!  That almost never happens these days.  This post is for February 21 - 27. 

Sunday: I am thankful to our Lord Jesus Christ that we can worship openly here in this country without fear or concern.  May around the world don't have that freedom.
 Patrick is not standing, he is leaning against the door!

Monday: Mercy found Avalyn's sunglasses.  She is such a goof ball.  I am thankful for my children having siblings.  They learn so much from each other.

Tuesday: Look at this pretty fabric!  I am thankful for beautiful fabric.  It may not be important, but it is nice getting to work with pretty things.  This is the main fabric for the back of Mercy's bed size quilt.

Wednesday: I planned a field trip for the kids' astronomy class.  I drove three of my children and three of Megan's.  We met up with several other moms and their children at the Fernbank planetarium.  The kids got to look around a small museum and then see the planetarium.  It was a nice time. I am thankful for the opportunity to see something different to help the kids understand more about what they are learning.  Here we are inside a kaleidoscope. I was surprised at how hard it was to get a good picture in here!

Thursday: I was feeling terrible!  I had a headache that hurt every time I moved, and every time someone or something made noise.  I took a couple of pictures of my dog laying on one of the kids art buckets.  It doesn't look like a comfortable pillow.  I am thankful for quiet days at home.  Even though I wasn't feeling well, and I didn't take the kids to school, the day was nice and quiet.

Friday: I still wasn't feeling well, but a bit better than on Thursday.  Patrick wanted to help Keira with the dishes.  I am thankful for my children helping with the house work.  With so many people in the family, I couldn't do all the work myself.  I am thankful that they are learning skills to work around the house.

Saturday:  Avalyn got a dragon book from the consignment sale.  She has made several of the dragons.  She loves throwing them and I love watching them fly.  We took them outside to let the dragons be in their natural habitat.  I am thankful for Avalyn and her interests in all sorts of things!