Reading and Quilting

I am being a little brave in showing this close up of the back of the quilt I am hand quilting. Its not perfect, but I am putting a lot of love into these stitches. I keep thinking of my grandmother while I am stitching and how she kept her family warm with quilts. I remember playing hide and seek behind a stack of folded quilts that was a least 3 or 4 feet high. It must have been summer time and the quilts were being stored until winter time for keeping bodies warm in unheated bedrooms.



This quilt top was meant to be a utility quilt. She made it from fabrics she had such as feed sacks. The Baptist Fans (aka Methodist Fans) quilting design is an old fashioned quilting design used especially on utility quilts. It got its name because it was an easy quilting design for church ladies to use for their quilting bees for making fundraiser quilts.


This is the inspirational book I am reading this week. I like Emilie Barnes very much and in this book she has taken her 15 minutes a day theme even further by writing 15 minute devotions for women.



Today I read about loving God first, then your neighbor as yourself. She wrote the devotion on how many woman do not love themselves or have a good self esteem. Its ok for us to take some time for ourselves or to treat ourselves. The assignment was to take a stroll in a pretty natural place and think of how wonderfully God has made me. (Psalm 139) Since the humidity and temperature are much better today I hope to do this on my lunch break!

Another thing I learned from Emilie Barnes is that when we are raising our children, we are also enfluencing future generations. My Grandmother has enfluenced me in many ways, along with my many other relatives.