Isaac's Friendship Galaxy Quilt

I have a fun baby quilt finish to share this week, my first finish of the year. In fact, the year was only 10 1/2 hours old when I finished stitching on the binding 😊 Hopefully that means I'll have a productive year with lots of finishes!

This Friendship Galaxy quilt is for little baby Isaac, our great-nephew. (Want to suddenly feel really old? Just realize you are a great-aunt and poof, there you go, suddenly old!) I had hoped to have pictures of Isaac on his quilt, since I was supposed to get to meet him on Monday, but sickness and bad weather prevented it, so I'll have to share those pictures another time.

This is the second Friendship Galaxy quilt I've made (you can see the one I made for Judah here). I wanted to make it a second time because a) it's a fun quilt and b) the background fabric I chose for Judah's quilt was quite busy and I wanted to see how the quilt would look with a simpler background. I really like the simpler background, and now I want to try making it with a light background and darker stars...so many possibilities!

If you'd like to explore the possibilities too, the pattern is available in my Etsy shop, and includes three other size options.

I made one giant friendship star to put on the back of the quilt.

I love how the simple stippling with stars looks on the back. The thread I used really blended in with the background fabric on the front, but it stands out better on the mottled grey backing fabric.

When I went to make the binding, I searched for the piece of background fabric I *know* I have and that I had set aside for the binding, but I couldn't find it. Since I thought I'd soon be gifting the quilt, I really wanted to get it finished, so I went with solid black instead. Turns out, I really like the solid black!

Fun fact - we have a lot of snow already this year. So much snow that walking across my backyard for these pictures was nearly impossible as I was sinking to my knees with every step. It's hard to pick out the depth, but here's one of my footprints.

What's a quilt blogger to do? I needed pictures and there's snow everywhere, so I headed back to the house and got my snowshoes 😊 I'm sure the neighbors thought I was crazy, snowshoeing back and forth across the yard, stringing a rope between trees and hanging up quilts, but hey, I got my pictures!

As some of you may know, I struggle with photography sometimes and I had already tried taking pictures of another quilt in the snow and the pictures were horrible. Really grey and dingy looking and not at all what I wanted. After a little reading about taking pictures in snow I discovered that using the flash setting on your camera for the white balance (not actually using the flash) can fix some of the dinginess in snow pictures. I gave it a try and the pictures in this post are the result. Still not perfect, especially because it was around 3 in the afternoon when I took the pictures, so there were lots of shadows, but they are much brighter than before. The snow and the quilt both look less awful than in my other pictures, so I'm pleased with the progress. Since this looks like it will be a very snowy winter, it's good to know I can still get decent quilt pictures...so long as I wear my snowshoes, of course!

Here's the quilt, one more time 😊

Have you finished anything yet this year? If you have a blog post about it, let me know in the comments so I can check it out 😊 And don't forget to get your copy of the Friendship Galaxy pattern!

Blaming Others

Devotion for the Week...

Have you ever noticed how people tend to put the blame on other people, or even things, when something goes wrong? "This tool is no good," or "She did this, so I had to do that," or simply, "It's not my fault!"

Sometimes the fault does lie with the other person, or with the tool we're using. Lots of times, though, the fault is really our own and we're just trying to put the blame somewhere else, anywhere else.

Shifting the blame isn't new, of course. In fact, I found it interesting that the Isrealites complained to Moses, putting the blame on him, in Numbers 20 when their problems weren't at all his fault, as you'll see.

Here's a recap of what had happened leading up to that point...the Isrealites had been living in Egypt as slaves and then God sent Moses to lead them out to the land God had promised to their ancestors. The people followed Moses, but they did more than a little complaining along the way. Finally, they arrived at the edge of the Promised Land and Moses sent in spies to check out the land.

When they returned, most of the spies said the land was amazing, but the people who lived there were so intimidating that there was no way the Isrealites would be able to defeat them. Two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, disagreed, saying that with God's help they could certainly prevail, but the people would not listen. Their complete lack of faith angered God, who condemned them to wander in the wilderness for 40 years, which is what they were doing in Numbers 20, when they arrived in a place where there was no water for them to drink.

“They quarreled with Moses and said, “If only we had died when our brothers fell dead before the Lord! Why did you bring the Lord’s community into this wilderness, that we and our livestock should die here? Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to this terrible place? It has no grain or figs, grapevines or pomegranates. And there is no water to drink" (vv.3-5)

Whine, whine, whine. Would they really have preferred to still be slaves in Egypt?

And why exactly are they still wandering in the wilderness rather than settling into their new homes (with perfectly good wells) in the Promised Land? Oh, right, because they wouldn't trust God. 

Moses wasn't responsible for their time in the wilderness. He hadn't been the one to turn against God and doubt God's power. The blame rested entirely on their own shoulders. But it was easier to blame Moses than to accept responsibility themselves.

Of course, putting the blame on someone else wasn't new, even then. Adam and Eve both shifted the blame way back in the Garden of Eden. When confronted by God about their disobedience, Adam said, "The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it" (Genesis 3:12) and Eve said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate" (v. 13).

It's not my fault!

How much easier life feels when everything that goes wrong is someone else's fault. It is much harder to admit we've done wrong, or that blame for our problem rests with no one but ourselves. But it is only when we can admit the wrong we've done that we begin to escape the 'wilderness' it has put us in.

First, we can only ask for forgiveness (from God, from others and even from ourselves) if we are able to admit that we were wrong. If we're still trying to justify ourselves, we won't see that we have done anything that requires forgiveness.

Then, it is only when we acknowledge that our actions or attitude were wrong that we can keep from repeating the wrong over and over again. I don't know about you, but I do enough new things wrong that I don't need to be repeating the old wrongs!

Next time we're tempted to blame someone else for our problems, maybe we should pause and take a good hard look at our own actions first.

2016 Ornaments

Happy New Year! I hope you had a great Christmas. We certainly did; it was a picture perfect white Christmas, with powdery snow that was at least knee deep. We even got to go snowshoeing with Mom and Dad while they were here 😊

Every year for Christmas I make my boys personalized ornaments that have something to do with their interests or special events of the year. Other than my free motion quilted ornaments, these were my only stitched gifts this year.

Back in the spring, Nathan wanted money to buy a few toys, so he decided to hold an art sale. He drew some pictures, then took them down by the main road through town and sold them. He only charged 10¢ per picture, but most people gave him more than that (some considerably more!). When the first batch of pictures sold, he promptly drew more, then more and then more again. And then more again...In the end, over the course of the summer, he made well over $100 and a good portion of the residents of our town now own Nathan Parsons originals 😊 A professional artist in town even bought one of Nathan's pictures, then gave Nathan a print of one of his own paintings. The ornament is a cross-stitch version of Nathan's sign that he held up while "art selling" as he called it.

Zachary's ornament was suggested by Paul this year. When one of our boys turns 12, Paul takes him on a weekend camping trip, just the two of them. This year it was Zach's turn and the two of them went to Gros Morne National Park, where they completed a geocache challenge, finding 5 caches hidden around the park and doing a fair bit of hiking to find them (all before getting rained out of their last day). The compass cross stitch was designed by Angee of October's Morning and it was perfect.

Aiden's was a little harder to come up with...He's still all about music, but I've already given him drum and guitar ornaments, so I wasn't sure what to do this year. Then Paul suggested the word music, but with the c unfinished and a pencil poised as if writing, to symbolize both Aiden's passion for music and the fact that he started writing his own music recently.

If you'd like to see their previous ornaments, you can see the 2015 ones here, 2014 here and the ones before then are all in this post.

This is one of my favourite Christmas traditions, and I love how much the boys speculate about what their ornaments will be each year.

Do you have any special handmade Christmas traditions?