Ethiopian Baby Quilt – My First Ever Quilt

Here’s the baby quilt I made for little baby Toph! He’s a cutie pie. His mom loved the quilt so much she said she wasn’t going to let him use it. I sincerely hope she changes her mind since it was meant for use every day.

Here are some photos of the process of making the quilt. I started with a sketch (not a pattern).

First I pieced it together starting from the middle.

Then added backing before I could "quilt" it - sew through the layers.
Here's the finished product -

Crazy Life

Starting classes in a rush – as in registering on a Friday and starting on a Monday (that was the first day of Spring Break), my dear ‘family’ arriving from 2 months on the read, and starting a part-time weekend job all at once conspired to keep me from writing on the blog at all. I knew it’d be less often, but I didn’t know it’d be this long before I got back to this.

I have now survived a few of the math class sessions, although the first one was very emotional. I realized somewhat after the fact that I am still in a huge transition with very little routine in my life, not a good recipe for healthy mental living for me. But since I’m starting to get a handle on studying again after 20 years out of school (not counting last year’s truncated start) and having worked a tiny bit now, I’m starting to settle back down. My ‘family’ hit the road again, (poor things – all got hit with a horrible stomach bug half way to their sister’s wedding in GA) so what do I do? Party!

Don’t tell them.

I had my small group over for dinner last Thursday. It’s really a large group. Being shy a couple of kids and some adults didn’t seem to really make it a small group. I enjoyed every minute of it. I love entertaining! The best part about having a small group dinner is that it doesn’t have to be fancy. Unlike throwing a shower, which I’m doing this evening: that takes a clean house and some decorating, and in my case, making a baby gift too.

Next entry, I’ll show you what I made. Thanks for praying by the way.

Pulling the Trigger

I'm actually still undecided about where to attend school. However, one program has a class I need starting on Monday, so I'm going to register today! Still not sure I will be going there for the whole program, but I may as well start with 2 classes and 6 credits, right?

All this is to say, the blog might be a little slim pickins over the next few weeks as I get back into academia. The gray matter might be a little slow at booting up.

Thanks for your prayers.

A Few More Thoughts on Art

I am a highly pragmatic person and at the same time I’m also very creative/artistic. Whenever I take the Myers Briggs Personality Indicator I score back and forth in one area, the Sensing and Intuitive area. I don’t think I’ve ever scored dead in the center – what is referred to as an X. My preference actually flip-flops on either side of this scale. The sensing person is stimulated by the tangible and the intuitive by imagination or possibilities. In fact, this is the area of the Myers Briggs test I have struggled the most to understand, because I don’t see these two preferences as opposite ends of the same scale.

My creative side crescendos when I can make a creative idea come together. But I rarely do anything creative that doesn’t have some practical purpose. I suppose the truly utilitarian person doesn’t find décor practical. But even in my recent venture into sewing I have tried to make useful items.

Some would say that we’d be nowhere without art. But I have struggled within at times to reconcile helping a starving, parentless world of need with creating beauty. Regardless of my mental struggle I am still driven to create. And that creative side usually produces practical beauty. If I’m good for nothing else to the needy, it’s to teach them some way of using their hands and imagination to make something practical.

One Day's Freebies

One day this week I ran a bunch of errands that included a trip to 2 of the three post-secondary schools I attended and hand-delivering the second official transcript from each to the office of the school that lost* my first ones. The third transcript was coming from Seattle, so I couldn’t go get that one. On that day I got a ton of free items, mainly from that school but a few others too.

Here’s what I came home with:

Courier bag
Water bottle
Black & yellow rice bowl with matching yellow rice spoon
Coffee mug
Stapler
2 half-blocks of branded post-it notes
A set of word fridge magnets
Yellow rubber ball
A ball point pen
Orange highlighter
A University car window sticker
2 branded lip balm sticks

Plus –
A cup of Caribou coffee
Tortilla chips at Baja Sol

*I say “lost” because they claim all three never arrived there. But with three transcripts coming from three locations, I have a hard time believing all three never got there. I still think they are stuck to the back of someone else’s mail and filed away.

I have to do before I do it

This is the kind way my mother described first-born perfectionism. I actually don’t ever remember her saying it about me, but she probably did. I’m the second first-born in my family. (We have a 10-year gap between the first three and the second two.) I do remember her using this phrase to describe my oldest brother. But I see it’s often fitting for me too.

I decided to make a special baby blanket for a special baby recently adopted by some friends of mine from Ethiopia. I want to use the “pattern” I saw used on a pillow in a craft store from the other day. But I needed to see if I could pull that off first, before I make the blanket.

So I decided to make a couple of pot holders in the same style. All that’s to say, here’s what I have been working on just for fun! (And practice.)

Connected by Art

The other day I had lunch with my older brother and my sister-in-law. They are a good dozen years older than me so in some ways they have lived in a different era than me. While I love my siblings, the chasm between me and the rest of my family is actually rather large on many levels. But I still feel some sort of kinship to them after all, they are family.

I think I have realized it in a more tangible way. Or at least there was a connection made for me. My family members nearly all carry in them a sort of innate artistic sense. We would all have agreed that my mother and eldest sister were the real family artists. Both of them actually went to college to study art. But I don’t think my father would have married my mom if he wasn’t somehow deeply appreciative of my mom’s abilities. I don’t even know if he was even aware of that fact. The two of them produced an entire family with some amount of natural abilities.

Our lunch conversation naturally revolved around what each of us had been up to lately. These two told me they were working on a necklace for her. A group project! I got an explanation of why it was both of them and later it came out that my brother was working on controlled rusting of a metal surface, an experiment they explained. He was working on a way to write words with rust on metal artwork.

Somewhere in the conversation they were both telling me about explaining what they do in retirement to a new acquaintance, an E.R. doctor. They became aware that the kinds of things they do are not what non-artistic people do. I had just a bit earlier been encouraging them to continue making sculpture out of found objects. They had made a moose (buffalo?) head last fall. It’s up on their front porch for the winter.

It dawned on me shortly after I got home that day that this is the bond I hold with my family. I may be very different in the things I deeply value from every single one of them. Certainly I differ in many tastes and interests than most of them. But we are all somehow connected by art; it’s in our fiber. We all may approach it differently but we all have some sense of it.