another one

"Once you have the courage to begin, you can succeed."

Quotes

I have been hearing alot of quotes lately. Since some of them are striking a chord with me I thought I would post them here so that I can find them later. This one was on stashbusters today:

"That which we persist in doing becomes easier. Not that the nature
of the thing has changed, but our power to do it has increased."

I don't know who the author is. Another quote/mantra that I have been using alot lately is This too shall pass. I tell myself this one alot in the middle of the night when I am up feeding little girl.

Stars over Time

I am almost finished with my "Stars Over Time" quilt. I am currently hand stitching the back of the binding and then I'll put a label on it and be done, done, done. I am looking forward to showing this off at my quilt guild meeting on Tuesday, since this was their challenge (from 2004 or 2005 I can't remember). This quilt is not only a ufo, but (other than the binding) is a stash busting project also. I have decided to reward myself for completing this by allowing myself to start a completely new project. Well a kind of new project. I have been making string pieces for Bonnie's string-x quilt as my leader/ender and have collected enough pieces to make another crib quilt so I will make that as my next project.

Expectations

A couple friends and I were talking yesterday about the expectaitions that we have for our children. One friend felt that she might have too high of expectations and the other felt that she had too low of expectations. This got me thinking and I pretty much have no expectations of my son. Which leads me to something else my friend said, which is that if you don't let them help out around the house when they are young and want to help they are not going to want to helpwhen they get older. So I am going to try to let/make my son helpout more around the house. I started by having him hand me hangers while I put away his clothes, and had him put stuff away in the drawers that he could reach, then I let him take the towels out of the dryer. He did really well with both of these tasks and I made sure to give him alot of praise. The next challenge will be to start teaching him to pick up his toys. I just need to remember to give him the time and to not get frustrated.

In quilting, I got all of the borders on my stars over time and have started to quilt it. I am looking forward to completing another ufo. Yeah!

A comparison

My mother was comparing the photos of my two smiling babies so I thought that I would post them here for all to see. The top photo is of little girl taken on October 23, 2006. The bottom photo is of silly boy taken November 18, 2004. This makes them roughly the same age in these photos.

More pictures

Here is a picture of little girl smiling. There is nothing better than a baby's first smiles.

The quilt pictures are from a Nimble Thimbles challenge called "Stars over Time". The challenge was that you got a yard of fabric and the patterns for all the stars. You had to use some of the challenge fabric in each of the stars. I have had these blocks done for a while but didn't know how to set them. I finally decided that done was better than perfect and just set them with sashing with cornerstones. I want a wider border, but don't have enough of the wizard fabric so I think I will do a second inner border of the green fabric. I have it on the design wall and am living with it for a few days before I make a final decision.

Some pictures

These are pictures of me and my friends with our kids at the Desert Botanical Garden. Twice a year they have a butterfly exhibt, the fall exhibit is the monarch butterflies. Silly boy was much more interested in playing with his car in the dirt. A car that he had smuggled in in the pocket of his pants. I didn't think about checking his pants pockets because these are the first pants that have had pockets. Didn't take him long to figure that one out!

Today we went out to Schnepf farms for their pumpkin festival. Silly boy had a great time riding the train, he didn't want to get off. I will post some more pictures in another post.