Three Years

For the past three years, nursing studies and adventures have been the focus of my time and energy and at their culmination I feel my old creative yearnings being breathed back to life from a hibernation of necessity. I have still been working slowly on the grandmothers garden quilt and have reduced my ambition for it as a single bed size quilt and am thinking of making two cot size quilts from it. Becoming engaged and married within nine months this year also awakened my crafty.

I embroidered table numbers using designs from Made in France: Cross Stitch and Embroidery in Red, White and Blue and started embroidering a monogram to place in the centre of a signature quilt like this one at Martha Stewart weddings. Our family and friends signed some heartwarming and creative messages and this was one of my favorite things from the wedding.  However, a huge mistake I made was not somehow letting guests know to allow for seam allowance - something which is so obvious to me, as the maker, but of course not obvious to everyone else.

Reading over posts of three years past, in some ways I seem so different and in others very much the same. I still want to make the same quilts. I have been collecting plaid fabrics to make a lap quilt for the couch (how I am enjoying finally having my own little home). I had forgotten about plain spoken and was going to make it from 4 inch squares, so re-reading my old self was a timely reminder. My blue and white wedding quilt replaces the blue and white Irish chain and its so funny, the fan quilt I talked of is the featured quilt for December in a calendar I bought at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during my visit last year. Freaky!

Other ways I have changed in the last three years, rededicating my life to Christ. I grew in a Christian home and always called myself that but wasn't living it. I can't describe how positively my relationship with God has changed my life. I escaped an emotionally abusive relationship and married the sweetest, most patient (I could go on and on) man. I completed a Bachelor of Nursing which has been so important to my self esteem. I am still a little affected in my writing, still introverted (although a little less so). Less obsessed with L.M. Montgomery and novel reading in general (three years of text books and journals seems to have cured that for now), although I still love Canada and want to visit P.E.I.

I have visited America and Canada, forfeited a honeymoon trip to Fiji due to a perforated eardrum and explored a lot more of Queensland.

So an era ends and a lifetime begins.