Today’s gift was simple – I sent my Mom a sweet little note and some chocolates in the mail to bring her some sunshine. I know she could use it. I love you Momma!
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29 Days, Days 5 – a quilt for my MIL
So I resumed counting yesterday on my 29 days and yesterday’s gift was a quilt to my mother-in-law. Yes this was her Christmas gift, and yes, its over a month late. But its still a gift because I worked SO hard on it. And its late because my father-in-law had very unexpected open heart surgery the week before Christmas and it threw us all for a loop. We truly forgot that it was Christmastime for about a week. Needless to say, most Christmas shopping/presents were completely put on hold. On top of that, my Mom broke her ankle the week before Thanksgiving, and had to have surgery. We had planned for her to come up the week before Christmas to stay with us for about 2-3 weeks while she was recovering. It was a very crazy time.
My MIL, Diana, seems to be more and more into the bold and bright colors that are often associated with the Hispanic cultures. I spent more time than I’d like to admit at the quilt shop, with a few employees, trying out various combinations of fabric. I didn’t want anything too pastel-y, and I didn’t want it to be too dark with greens and blues. So far, everyone I’ve shown the quilt to has loved the color combo. I’m super happy with it myself. I quilted it on the diagonal for the first time, thanks to much inspiration from Ashley. If you look close enough, you can see where my straight lines weren’t so straight. But you wouldn’t look that close since you don’t want to get pinched. :)
The binding was kept simple – there was already so much color, that I didn’t want to take away from the quilt with yet more busy-ness. Its Kona Orange. Seems to really tie it all in together, don’t you think? Finished dimensions are 70″ x 70″. The pattern was based off of the “It’s a Rosy Day” quilt from Quilt Magazine in April 2009.
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29 Days, Days 5 – 9
… have not been such good gift giving days. But, I have not forgotten. I’m going to give myself the gift of forgiveness, and carry on tomorrow with my gift-giving. I’ve been really focused on my own thoughts the last few days, and unfortunately, nothing very “thoughtful”.
29 Days, Day 4
Wow, I’m exhausted! I spent all day with about 300 children. Every year I judge a Lego-League competition, and today was the day! I was fortunate enough to see the research presentation of a number of teams, on the topic of “smart moves” which involved transportation safety, efficiency and innovation. And so that was my gift today – a donation of 10 hours to lots of 8-14 year olds! It was that much more of a gift, considering I worked 28 hours within 36 between Thursday and Friday. I’m SO ready for a lazy Sunday!
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29 Days, Days 2 & 3
I’m writing this a day late because I worked until 11pm last night and was awfully tired when I got home. Plus, day’s two gift meant I had to go straight to bed.
My gift for day 2 was doing a double shift for today (day 3). Yes, I got paid for it, but I *certainly* didn’t want to do it; especially after working til 11pm, and then having to show up at 7am for a 16 hour shift. Oh, and I have to get up early tomorrow as well to judge a Lego League competition at Georgia Tech. I’m going to crash come Sunday.
As for my gift on Day 3 – working 16 hours has made my brain foggy. I think today’s gift was simply saying some kind words to a new PACU nurse.
I’m still having a hard time distinguishing “doing my job” from “giving” while at work… because so much of my job IS to give to others (namely patients). But this is about going beyond what we normally do, and beyond ourselves, so hopefully as I continue this it will be become more and more clear how to give to others while at work. I think it will be about giving to my co-workers…
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29 Days, Day 1
I’ve realized its hard to give at work, in a sense, because my job (anesthesia) is to take care of others, and I don’t feel its right to call ‘doing my job’ a gift to others, although I’m often so honored to be taking care of people. To be trusted by the patient and the family to take care of them at a most vulnerable (and potentially dangerous) time.
So for today’s gifts, I think I’ll count two things: one was taking over a co-workers room early so he could go home sooner since he’d had a hard day. And two, I brought syringes of a medication up to a super nice nurse (Amanda) in L&D so she didn’t have to track them down herself. Not two huge things, but nice, I think.
Tomorrow I work the same shift, and I’ll again be on the lookout for opportunities!
29 Gifts in 29 Days
I don’t remember how, but a little while back I stumbled across the website 29gifts.org. Its whole focus, or purpose, is to encourage people to give to others – anything – from a smile, to a card, to money, clothes, anything to take the focus off of ourselves, and place it on someone else in need.
My mom and I were talking today about living a life of gratitude, and I remembered this site. I’m going to start tomorrow :) The hard part for me, I think, is that I work from 11am – 11pm, and will have to find a way to give while at work. I guess that really won’t be hard – there should be plenty of ways to give – and I’m open to seeing how :)
I feel like I spend too much of my time worrying about silly stuff. I mean, REALLY silly stuff. Like, “will I be able to get to the fabric store this weekend (to up my stash)” or “I don’t really want to go to work today (instead of, damn – I’m so grateful to have a job that I enjoy)” or “which diet do I want to try today (instead of, Thank you, God, for the abundance of food and clean water)”. I don’t spend enough time in a grateful state of mind, and I’m hoping to get to the point where I’m in a relatively constant state of “appreciate living”.
The Haiti earthquake only serves to remind me to be so grateful for all of my gifts, and to be ever mindful of how to help others around me.
I’ll chronicle here how I’ve giving, day by day – hopefully it will inspire you to get on board and give to others around you in need!
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Ladybug dress for McKenna
At Discover Sewing, where I got my sewing machine, great classes are offered every month. August I signed up for a yoke dress class and had no idea what I was getting into! I started out by picking an adorable lady bug fabric by fabric finders, and then started the cutting. And cutting. And cutting. The pattern is “Lee” by The Children’s Corner.
This was not only my first dress construction, but also my first smocking project. The night before I started this dress I bought a book on smocking and did a little “crash course”. It was neat watching my friend, Amanda, pleat the yoke. And from there we “blocked” it, or squared it off to be ready for smocking. I’m grateful to have a friend that has smocked (and sewn) and truly ridiculous amount of young girls clothing.
So I went to work on the smocking. It took me weeks to get there, because after only 45 min or so, my eyes would start to lose the ability to focus! I probably should invest in an Ott light!
When the smocking of the yoke was finally completed, I was ready (and eager!) to get the dress constructed! What a learning curve! Most of the things were pretty straight forward, but the part that was the hardest for me, and the most time intensive was attaching the sleeves to the yoke. They were just tiny holes and really hard to manipulate with a standard sewing machine. Amanda was at my rescue, and when I had almost reached the point of yanking my hair out, she oh-so-politely asked if she could “just borrow the dress for a few minutes”. She was so considerate because she knew that it was really important for me to do the dress “all by myself” (yes, like a 5 year old!), but I just couldn’t get this right. So once the arms were attached, I was successfully up and running again.
The last few hours of the project were spent doing the handwork stuff, like adding in the buttons, sewing the sleeve edges in, and sewing down the 1/2″ lining thing that goes just around the neck (can’t remember what its called!). The dress was finally completed, and both my husband, Matt, and I were truly amazed at how cute it was. I had decided about 10 hours into the project when I realized that this might turn out somewhat acceptable, that I would give it to my neice, McKenna, for her 2nd birthday. It was very well received by her parents, and they said as soon as it fits her, they’ll send me a photo with it – and they promised to neither give it away or feed her spaghetti while wearing said dress :) All good things!
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Lainey’s Quilt – Completed
I think this was a success. Lainey seemed super happy to receive it; it was probably one of the very rare times I’ve seen her speechless!
The entire quilt is sashed in a 4″ kona white, and I love the way it made the colors pop! The binding was a vibrant orange that was used as some of the orange squares in the quilt.
The back was lots of my favorite Amy Butler Mist, Kona white, and the pattern piece (please forgive, I don’t know who made it – any ideas?) that was speckled all over the front.
For the quilting, this was my first foray into machine free motion quilting. I’m really thrilled with how it came out. I used a really vivid orange variegated thread by “signatures”. I loved how non-linty it was. I was so hesitant at first to do a bright thread for the quilting, thinking it would detract from the quilt itself, but it did so much to tie it all together – I’m so glad I took the risk.
Once it was all quilted, I washed it to get that crinkly goodness. Everyone seemed really smitten with the quilt; the little girl across the street, Sarah, that watches our dogs for us offered to give it a home if Lainey didn’t want it :)
Traditional quilt block
Its 22″ square, and only took (gasp!) 4 hours to complete! :)
This will be one of many in the queen sized quilt to come!
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