Recap of November

I'm not sure where the month of November went! Well, I am, really, so here are a few pictures to share!

 First of all, the quilt show in North Augusta, SC, where I entered my Words to Live By quilt. It was a great show and I feel honored to have won this ribbon - there were many great appliqué quilts.

 I was thrilled with the ribbon!

 Here is my Black and White BOM I finished earlier this year . . . .

And last, my Botanical Garden. A really fun quilt to make,  inspired by Sarah Fielke's book. 

This show was on a Friday and Saturday and I left Sunday for Nicaragua for another mission trip. There were three of us ladies, carrying packages to 74 sponsored children at a Christian School there. 

 Here we are with all our bags, ready to leave.

Sylvia shares more of Jesus' love to the children as we are getting ready to distribute the care packages while the children eagerly wait! 

 I was able to see these children that my husband and I had sponsored in person! 

 What a joy. . .

 and this precious girl we have corresponded with for five years and now she is graduating from high school, wanting to become a nurse. They were all three graduating.

 We took the 15 graduating seniors on a day trip to Lake Nicaragua, lunch at a restaurant and to this gorgeous overlook at Catarina below.

One little village we visited has no running water. This is the way all the people get their water - they go down this path past where the road goes, wash their clothes in the 'river', which is really a stream, bag their clothes up and fill their five gallon bucket and walk back up the hill to their home. Truly amazing!! A well has been dug nearby and now there is an effort to raise funds to pipe the water a couple of miles down the road so the people will have water at their homes. The path was difficult to walk down for us, yet they do it frequently.

Here is the 'river' where they have carved out areas to sit on the rocks as they wash their clothes.

This little ten year old girl filled her bucket with water and waited to lead us up the path.

She would not go until we followed and she knew we would be okay, the whole time holding the bucket of water on her head. Amazing! 

Another exciting thing is that a sewing ministry was started five years ago and many are graduating from this school and are able to have home businesses to make money to help support their families. It's great to see that sewing, which I love so much, reaches around the world to help others!!!

Bible Quilt UFO

My current UFO project is a Bible Quilt, pattern by Jan Patek, I began - oops - in the nineties, finally completed the appliqué in the 2000s and set it aside. It has embroidery work for the lettering and I was not real comfortable with that so, I put it away all neatly in my portfolio case. Since I have done so much work with wool in the last 3 years, I am no longer afraid of the lettering and hand stitching.

 Here is block one and

 the picture of Jan's quilt on the cover. This was one of the first BOMs I had ever seen and it seemed SO expensive - it was $6.50 a month, and all I could think was that you could buy a book for $20 back then. Anyway, I liked it so much I bought it.

 I used a lot of Roberta Horton plaids and stripes which were so easy to appliqué with the fineness of those fabrics.

 Here is my portfolio case. Only problem is, it holds the blocks so neatly you just let them age too well!

 I put a pocket for the patterns on one side and

 the other side holds the blocks in place nice and flat. My first case was made by a friend and given to me and since then I've made a couple more to accommodate the size blocks I was making.