Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Winter Days

Gone is the brown and drab of yesterday... Thousands of snowflakes now dancing down from the sky, lacing the evergreens and everything in white beauty & splendor!
Outside this winter we've had snow and rain and mud and ice, sunshine and clouds and fog, drabness and beauty, warm (40 degree days!) and cold and colder and coldest (Windchill -50!). But inside our home we've had...
Puzzles that take days to complete...  
Homemade soup, cornbread and candle light!
Long Monopoly games!
Fresh fruit for breakfast! (Sunshine in a bowl!)
Tea in my favorite mug! (It's a hug-a-mug, handmade pottery!) 

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Pinwheel Quilt

   It's January, the perfect time of year to finish long neglected sewing projects...  Like this pink pinwheel quilt! Today was the day that I finally completed it!

   I am what you might call a practical, resourceful & frugal craftswoman. My creativity mixed with practicality hearkens more back to the days when woman sewed clothes for their families, knit mittens & scarves and pieced together crazy quilts to save money and not as a hobby. They used what they had. It maybe wasn't the best or nicest, but it kept the budget balanced, the family clothed and the house homey! Yeah that's me, I love being creative, but I am practical too... 

   Now quilting can be expensive... But it doesn't have to be!  I spent under $4 on this quilt! And my first quilt (pictured above with the pinwheel quilt) cost me nothing, besides my time! How? Rummage sales, thrift stores, and free boxes, plus a creative imagination and VOILA, quilt on the cheap! 😉 The white fabric with light pink flowers on it used to be a blouse. (From a free box!)  The only material I had to purchase was the border. Which I bought after I had the rest of the quilt together, so I am very pleased with how well it matches the other fabrics! I decided to tie it, instead of quilt it. (I quilted my 1st one.) I do love the quilted look more I think, but tying was so fast and easy! 


    Both these quilts are "baby size", mostly because making a bigger quilt has sounded daunting to me in the past! But now that I have completed these, I am feeling more confident of someday starting a larger one! We will see.


   Since these quilts are baby-size  I will be tucking them away in my hope chest for, Lord willing, my own babies someday!  And, yes, I very intentionally made a blue one and a pink one!😊

Friday, January 13, 2017

Happiness...


"Happiness comes from a heart of gratitude and thankfulness. 
 Victory lies in the recognition that God is good." 
- Michael Phillips, Wild Grows the Heather in Devon

    
    I find the words God is good gracing my stationary.  It is true and it is changing me. Really believing that God is good, that He is Goodness, is reviving life in me, giving me joy & peace in Him! Like fresh air to my lungs, is God's goodness to my soul! Indeed what true happiness & victory there is for the soul that believes God is good!

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

As White as Snow!


   I had fun designing & decorating our Church's bulletin board for the Christmas/Winter season! (Pictured above) I was a little nervous about the project, since I do most of my design work on 5x3 inch card-stock! So this 5 foot square board was definitively a big size upgrade for me! But I am very happy with how it turned out! 😀

Friday, January 6, 2017

Journal 1-6-17

Christmas Day rain!
   Our Christmas celebrations were very laid back & simple this year. We attended our church's Christmas Eve Service. And on Christmas day My Grandparents joined us for dinner. Instead of a white Christmas we had a wet and rainy one! (Some thunder too!) All very odd for December 25th in Minnesota! I was tempted to go puddle jumping! But I refrained myself from such frivolities as I had guests to entertain!😉 

Holly and I made this Gingerbread 
house one December afternoon!


















































Nativity from my Great great Grandparents.
   I spent most of my "Christmas vacation" feeling very ill! (Thus my quiet blog over the holidays.) 😔 I am thankfully doing much better now! It feels great to be able to think coherent thoughts again! In all of my life I strive to have a heart to learn. One thing I learned/observed in myself while I was under-the-weather was... I say a lot of worthless things! When I lost my voice I found that it was normally a good thing that I wasn't able to say the things that I was thinking!  Now that I have my voice back I am challenged to be more mindful of the words of my mouth! Just because I have the ability to speak doesn't mean I should speak! I am reminded of the verse in Colossians 4:6 "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man." 
 

   I am growing a new appreciation for the winter months. Though I am still not in love with the freezing cold... I do enjoy having more time to devote to homemaking! More   time to clean, organize, decorate & bake! Yesterday I started cleaning out our guest room/sewing room, which for the last several months has been the catch-all room! (If we didn't know where something went, it went to that room!) As most of my organizing projects go, I soon was cleaning out a completely different area of the house from where I had started. Because while cleaning place #1 I ran across something that should go to place #2 and that is were I stayed for the remainder of the day! Thus our office got a purging instead! Accomplishing something -yes- just not exactly what I had planned on accomplishing in the beginning! So it is off to the guest room again today! I love organizing... so I am excited! 😁 

Holly's Christmas Village

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Happy New Year 2017!

I hope 2017 is finding you  happy, healthy and hopeful!