French Knot Flowers

I have started a new long term project. And by long term, I mean looooooong term! It doesn't look like much yet, but I'm hoping it will eventually be pretty. 

Kitty of Night Quilter has been making milestone quilts for years and has created a whole membership community around the idea of quilting your life. While I'm not a member of the Quilt Your Life Crew, I have always admired the interesting quilts she has made and the whole idea of the positive feedback loops created by earning quilt blocks. Kitty's most recent project documents her daily core strengthening exercises, using a coloured strip for each day she does her exercises and with a plan for this to be a quilt with no end. 

I loved that idea, especially since core work is something I struggle to be consistent with, too. I have muscle spasms in my back that cause nagging pain and my physiotherapist prescribed planks, clamshells and a few other exercises to strengthen my core and fix the issues. That means I have plenty of reason to be doing the core work, but somehow finding the motivation is still hard. How is it that I can find more than an hour to go for a walk most days, but the 15 minutes the exercises take is almost impossible? It all comes down to interest. I love my daily walks, but there's nothing very exciting about doing planks!

On a walk I pondered ways to turn Kitty's tracking quilt into something I could stick with and I hit upon the idea of a hoop of french knot flowers. 

It hits all the right points for me:

• I don't need my sewing machine. This was a big one, because I wanted something I could do right away after finishing the exercises, without needing to set up my sewing machine or switch it from fmq mode if I was in the middle of quilting something.
• It's super fast to do each day's knot. I didn't want something that would take much time each day because I'm more likely to actually do it if it's fast.
• There's no prep time needed each day. I know that I'll put off cutting fabric or tracing more flowers or anything like that, so I designed the flower hoop so that all the prep work is done, other than cutting a length of thread now and then. That much I think I can manage!

I wanted to make it almost impossible to fall behind with this project because I know myself well enough to know that if I fall behind, the whole project will likely fall by the wayside. More than wanting the flowers to eventually be filled with colourful french knots, I really want to be stronger and pain free!

So far the plan is working 😊 I drew the flowers, did my exercises and then made my first french knot on Halloween, in between trick-or-treaters. I now have 9 french knots, after not missing a single day since I started! That's already more consecutive days of core work than I've ever done before.

Is this going to take for.e.ver? Yes, yes it is! But that's kind of the point. These are exercises that need to become part of my life, so I might as well have a motivation that's going to last a long time, too 😊

Spread it Liberally

 Devotion for the Week...

The WIPS-B-GONE challenge is almost halfway finished. Day 50 will be this Thursday, November 11. It is so much fun to scroll through the hashtag and comment on each photo, reading about daily progress. It's especially fun when I get to help celebrate a finish! What has been fun, too, is seeing that other challenge participants are also scrolling the hashtag, commenting and celebrating. It's a WIP finishing party that spans several continents and I love it!

My dragon cross stitch was the project that started the whole challenge and I'm slowly picking away at finishing it. I worried that my IG followers might get sick of seeing it, since it's not a quilt, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all. Every post about the dragon will get comments like "the dragon is looking so good!" or "you're making so much progress!" or "you're really rocking along!" The encouragement always feels great and helps keep me motivated to work on the backstitching again the next day.

Writing to the Thessalonians, Paul said, "encourage each other and build each other up, just as you are already doing" (1 Thessalonians 5:11). That was the last sentence in a section about being alert and aware, ready for when Jesus will come again and it was directed at all of the people, not just the head of the church. The implication was that everyone would be involved with encouraging and lifting up all of the other believers around them, knowing that this would help everyone to stay focused on God.

The world can be distracting and discouraging. It's easy to get pulled into the messiness of life and to let our focus shift away from God. What a difference it makes if we have an encourager, though! Someone who can cheer us on, who can lift us up when we're having a hard day, who will remind us that "Christ died for us so that, whether we are dead or alive when he returns, we can live with him forever" (v. 10).

Encouraging others doesn't cost us anything and it doesn't require a lot of time or special training. All it takes is a willingness to focus on the people around us and to cheer them on. With just a little effort, we could all be spreading encouragement everywhere we go. 

Oblivious

 Devotion for the Week...

I find my devotions here are often triggered by my morning Bible reading, so you can almost trace my progress though the Old Testament by which book I'm sharing from on a Monday morning. This week I moved into the book of Esther and one particular moment stood out for me in light of current social justice conversations.

Some quick backstory from Esther chapters 1-3 - King Xerxes had a beautiful queen and in a drunken moment he commanded her to appear before his guests wearing her crown (I have heard that some scholars believe the command meant she should come wearing only the crown), and when she refused he deposed her as queen. Some time later he was lonely and decided to hold a beauty pageant of sorts to find a new queen. There's a whole issue there on the treatment of women, but that's not today's post. A young Jew named Esther was chosen as the new queen, though she kept her Jewish ancestry a secret. Then King Xerxes promoted a man named Haman to be the most powerful official in the kingdom and everyone bowed down to Haman. Everyone, that is, except Esther's uncle Mordecai. Haman flew into a rage over Mordecai's disrespect and he decided that punishing only Mordecai would not be enough. Instead, he convinced the king to issue a decree that on a specific day anyone at all could kill all of the Jews in the land with no repercussions at all.

"When Mordecai learned about all that had been done, he tore his clothes, put on burlap and ashes, and went out into the city, crying with a loud and bitter wail. He went as far as the gate of the palace, for no one was allowed to enter the palace gate while wearing clothes of mourning. And as news of the king’s decree reached all the provinces, there was great mourning among the Jews. They fasted, wept, and wailed, and many people lay in burlap and ashes" (Esther 4:1-3). The Jews everywhere were justifiably upset by the king's decree. Can you even imagine the talk and the panic that spread through the Jewish communities?

When Esther learned that Mordecai was dressed in mourning clothes and sitting at the palace gates, she sent one of her servants "to go to Mordecai and find out what was troubling him and why he was in mourning" (v. 5). And that was the moment that stopped me in my tracks. Esther, tucked away in the safety of the palace, was completely oblivious to what was going on in the rest of the kingdom. 

How often are we oblivious to the plight of others? We may not see the difficulties of the poor because we've never had to wonder where our next meal will come from. Or maybe we don't know the worries the homeless deal with because we've always had a safe place to live. Maybe we can't see the complexities that make it hard for a person to leave an abusive relationship because our relationships have always been healthy ones. Certainly those of us who are white do not understand the hardships faced by people of colour purely because of the colour of their skin.

Esther didn't know about the threat facing her people because she was separated from them, just as keeping ourselves apart from others prevents us from knowing what they face. Getting to know their situations is the first step in helping fix the problems. That has to be a conscious choice, though. 

In the following chapters, Esther steps up and pleads her case to King Xerxes, thereby saving the Jews (that's the super simplified version). There are three factors to her being able to save them: first, she was aware of the problem; second, she had the position to be able to do something about it; third, she did what needed to be done.

How can we be like Esther? There's no shortage of problems to be fixed in our society. While not many of us hold political office or have the funds to make huge donations, there are ways to use the positions and influence we do have, however small we may think they are. So the question becomes, will we do what needs to be done?