Strawberry Season

Devotion for the Week...

This past week my strawberry plants started to flower. It kind of amused me to finally see the flowers because a couple of people I know traveled to the Strawberry Festival in Florida back in March and posted pictures on social media of the abundance of strawberries they bought. In March! I won't actually have berries until at least the middle of July! I know we're pretty far north, but things like that really serve to emphasize just how far north we are.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 is a familiar passage: 

"For everything there is a season,

    a time for every activity under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die.

    A time to plant and a time to harvest.

A time to kill and a time to heal.

    A time to tear down and a time to build up.

A time to cry and a time to laugh.

    A time to grieve and a time to dance.

A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones.

    A time to embrace and a time to turn away.

A time to search and a time to quit searching.

    A time to keep and a time to throw away.

A time to tear and a time to mend.

    A time to be quiet and a time to speak.

A time to love and a time to hate.

    A time for war and a time for peace."

My strawberry season comes a lot later than yours, if you live in Florida. Actually, most places would have strawberry season before I do. I'll admit that back in March I really wanted my strawberry season to be starting when I saw their berries, but at that point my plants were still buried under several feet of snow. Berries felt a long ways away.

The nice thing about strawberry season is I can be reasonably certain it will come. Bar some crazy weather event, there will be strawberries ready to harvest near me sometime in July, even if something drastic should happen to destroy my own plants. Though I can't do anything to make them ripen faster, I know that if I'm patient, I'll eventually get to eat some delicious, locally grown berries.

We humans are an impatient lot, though. Whatever season we want, we want it now and it gets even harder to wait when we see someone else enjoying the season we want, before we get to have it. Whether that other person has reached a goal we want to reach, traveled somewhere we want to go or been awarded an accolade we long for, seeing them have it can make us want it all the more. 

Unfortunately, we can't always be certain we'll get the things we want. Plenty of the big things we want in life don't come with the regularity of a gardening season; things like relationships or having a child or getting your dream job aren't guaranteed, much as we would like them to be.

God tells us that life has seasons, though. We might be in a waiting season right now, with the thing we want feeling so far away, but "we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God" (Romans 8:28), even the waiting seasons. And maybe, just maybe, the thing we want is like plants still buried under the snow, so to speak. Maybe what we want is coming, but it's just not the right season yet. 

Noodles in Winter Wonder

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These days I'm regularly checking the front garden, where Mom and I planted daylillies last summer, watching as the new plants grow and anticipating flowers. At the same time, I have a winter-themed quilt to share today. Good thing no one ever said your sewing projects have to match the current season!

This Noodles mini is made in Winter Wonder fabrics by Heather Peterson for Riley Blake and I think it's adorable. I may be biased, though. Want to make your own Noodles quilt? Get the pattern here.

I love the addition of teal in this fabric line. The reds, greens, greys and whites feel more traditional, but the teal gives it a more modern feel.

I fell in love with this winter scene print as soon as I saw it. I knew I didn't want to cut it into little tiny pieces (though you know I love quilts with tiny pieces!) because I didn't want the scene to get lost. The Noodles block is fun for these larger scale prints because the inset curve gives the block an interesting focal point, while still keeping the larger square mostly intact.

This was the first time I used a directional print for the Noodles blocks. I had to pay attention to where each block would go in the quilt, to make sure I cut each curve correctly and I'm happy to say I got them all right on the first try. Hooray!

These snowflakes remind me of EPP diamond stars.

I used this polka dot print in white for some of the blocks, in brown for all of the inset curves and in teal for the backing. For some reason, it makes me think of cupcakes with sprinkles. Yum! Of course, now I want a cupcake with sprinkles...

Another mini quilt made means I've used another scrap piece of Warm and Natural batting from the boxes in our spare room. I'm nowhere near emptying even the first box, but I can fit all the scraps into the boxes now, so I'm making progress!

I quilted pebbles in the inset curves using Aurifil 50 wt. 2360. It has been a while since I quilted pebbles and it was fun to stitch just a few. Filling such a small space with pebbles didn't take long at all.

Then I echoed the curve in the background, using Aurifil 2600. The first Noodles quilt I made, I used my walking foot to echo the curves, but this time I used my free motion foot. That means the lines are much more organic looking this time and the spacing between them is more fluid and I love it.

Of course, I love how the quilting looks on the back. The teal sprinkle print isn't a solid, but it's pretty close, so the quilting shows up beautifully. Doesn't it make you want to reach through the screen to feel the texture??

More texture goodness...

The Noodles pattern includes instructions for this mini size, along with a baby quilt and a throw quilt, plus the curve is a pretty gentle one, so it's a great introduction if you're new to sewing curves. Get the pattern as a PDF or as a printed pattern (with free shipping anywhere in the world!).

Once you have your pattern, you can get the Winter Wonder fabrics here to make your own winter-themed Noodles quilt 😊

My Christmas/winter quilt collection has grown by one more 😊 Do you have many Christmas/winter quilts?

Don't forget to pin this for later!

Clean the Stable

Devotion for the Week...

I enjoy reading the book of Proverbs. It's full of little wise snippets about living well, so it's a practical book, plus most of the proverbs are easily understood, so it's not at all a hard book to read. I smiled recently when I read "Without oxen a stable stays clean, but you need a strong ox for a large harvest" (Proverbs 14:4). 

I've never lived or worked on a farm. I don't even remember ever visiting a stable that housed oxen, but I can imagine such a stable is not an easy place to keep clean. I'm thinking there would be a lot of time spent removing manure, which doesn't sound like it would be much fun. Obviously, if a farmer didn't have any oxen in the stable, they'd save a lot of time and effort keeping it clean!

On the flip side, though, without an ox to pull the farming equipment, the land they could farm would be severely limited. Well, it would have been in Bible times, anyway. I doubt many farmers are using oxen these days! So, without an ox they save on the time and effort spent cleaning the barn, but they also limit their harvest, limiting either the food they produce for their own family or how much they could sell. Either way, that limitation wouldn't be a good thing at all. Suddenly the time and energy required to clean up after an ox seems a lot more worth it.

You've likely heard the phrase 'short term pain for long term gain,' which is precisely what this proverb is demonstrating. Yes, sometimes the work that needs to be done is hard or time consuming or just not fun, but doing the work today sets us up for so much good in the future that it far outweighs the pain of the work.

If I had to guess, I'd say you're probably not trying to decide whether or not adding an ox to your stable would be worth the effort. Is there something, though, that you're considering that would be a lot of work, but that could increase your efficiency or your ability to do meaningful work? That's your ox. What work would your ox require of you? What would your ox make possible? Is the potential harvest worth the work of cleaning the stable?