I'm back

Finally, I feel like I have something to show again. It has been a long road and a lot has happened. I noticed that Blogger has changed and I realized that I needed some help. So this will be an update without pictures. Once we've got this figured out, the pictures will follow. 

My shoulder is feeling much better thanks to a shot of cortisone and a lot of physiotherapy. I’m still not quite there, but I have been doing some appliqué again. I realize that I will have to take it easier than before.

But as I said, a lot has happened. The first few weeks of the year we were busy with looking after grandma’s things. Even in a small room in a retirement home, you can stash a lot!

At the end of January/beginning of February, we went on a learning tour to Kenya and Tanzania. We have been involved with the Canadian Food Grains Bank for quite a few years and when our feed mill and the local Mennonite Central Committee office organized this trip, I was ready to go. It took some work to get Laurence interested, but now he is the one who wants to go back. We saw a lot and experienced a lot. Anybody interested can find more about our trip at www.grainsofhopelearningtour.blogspot.com. I even met some quilters in Nairobi -- more about that later.

And now to the next big event! Any day now we hope to have our first grandchild: we have been anxiously waiting for over a week now for a call from Shawn and Emily. Of course, with a baby comes a baby quilt! My friend Carol helped me accomplish that. Since Emily’s sister had a little girl 3 weeks ago, I’m making a baby quilt for her as well, as we speak. But at least now I’m able to do it all myself. 

The weather has been good. Most of the planting is done. The flower beds look great. I filled up the holes here and there with new plants and now I hope that it all will look as nice as I have envisioned.

This will be it. We better try and get Blogger sorted out before I do more.

Taking a break.

The partly knitted sock has been put away, the sewing machine is back in the cabinet and all the fabric has been put on the shelves. Yes, I have done, what I set out to do. Has it helped my shoulder? Not really. I think ,that it might take longer then I thought and I might need to get somebody to look at it. In the meantime, this blog was supposed to be about quilting and since nothing new happens around here, I have trouble finding things to write about. Don't forget, writing does not come easy to me. So I have made the decission to stop for a while. I might come back once in a while,when I have something newsworthy to talk about. And with a lot of help from a very good friend I will update all the information on this blog. To finish I will show some pictures of the Album Quilt from last week. I took a 10 months class with Rosemary Mahkan and this quilt was the result. I loved every minute of it. We used the different books by Elly Sienkiewicz. Starting with an easy one, we slowly build up to the difficult ones I put in the center. These blocks all have a special meaning for me. I grew up on a dairy farm and yes, I learned how to milk by hand. I do realize, that the conformation of this cow is extremely poor, but that's as good as it gets in fabric. While growing up I spend as much time as possible with our horses. And our favorites were our Frisians, which we drove, rode and showed. This is my first horse, Marietha. It was really hard to leave her behind, but you can't have it all. I have always loved flowers and plants. My mother had gorgeous flowers in the house, not much outside and it must have rubbed of on me. When we moved to the farm, I had a large garden with lots of flowers. Now there are less outside, but it seems that each year there are more inside, especially orchids. On the farm we had a large vegetable garden. We used to pick peas, not by the basket, but by the bushel. We could take them to a peasheller,what helped. We also had a mulberry tree, sour cherries, apple and pear tree. And we had a bigger family. Do I miss all the canning and freezing? Not really. With just the 2 of us, we don't need as much. So I'm down ,but not out. I will be back with new quilt ideas. Some have been floating around in my head for a while now and after a rest I hope to be ready to tackle a new project.