Funeral Flowers

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
-Marcel Proust

An older man in the ward {LDS-speak for parish or congregation} passed away last weekend. His funeral was Wednesday. The ward always arranges for a luncheon after the funeral for the family of the deceased. This man's wife is the most amazing gardener. She spends 4 or 5 hours every day in her yarden {term for a beautifully landscaped yard}. So the committee chair wanted to put a few fresh flower arrangements on the tables for the luncheon. She called me to see if I could put something together. There isn't too much blooming right now, but I was happy to put together what I could. There were eight tables set up in two long rows. The committee covered the tables with pretty sherbet-colored {vinyl} table cloths in pink, peach and yellow. Someone else provided little vases with Black-Eyed Susans, so we alternated the jars of flowers with the other vases on the tables, so it turned out really pretty.

{Shasta Daisies, Black-Eyed Susans, Coconut Lime Coneflowers, Green Envy Coneflowers (the dark purle ones), Cotton Candy Coneflowers (far right jar), Pincushion Flowers (scabiosa), and Coreopsis}

LadyBug who is my constant shadow {which I absolutely adore}, helped me put the flowers together . I cut the flowers and she gave them a little shake to hopefully get any bugs off. Then she helped me trim the leaves away and put them in the jars. She was enamored with the little yellow coreopsis. She commented how soft the petals were. She told me that she wanted one of her own, so I sent her out to cut one for herself. When she came in, she said she wanted it in a vase. I suggested a little glass container, but it was too big. She found a little Tupperware cup and put the flower in it with some water. Then we decided it would be fun to make a little arrangement, so she went out and cut some more flowers, until her little 'vase' was all filled. Then she picked some ribbon to tie around it. It would have been fun to include her bouquet in the picture with the big jars, but we were in a hurry to get them over to the church, so I finished up her little arrangement with a bow when we got back and then we took some pictures of it.

LadyBug put her little arrangement on the windowsill in her room.

Weather Widget

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while. -Kin Hubbard

I recently found the coolest weather widget. It tells the time, temperature and location, and there is even a cute little picture that reflects the weather and time of day.

YoWindow.com
Forecast by NWS

I started out with just a small widget in my sidebar. It was 150 x 150, included the current time and temperature and you could just make out that there was a little landscape going on. If you clicked on it, it expanded to full-screen and lots more details about the weather were available. I showed it to LadyBug yesterday during a thunderstorm {we had more fun watching the rain on the widget than we did watching it out the window} and she thought it was so cool that she wanted to add one to her blog too. Her sidebar is wider {220 pixels} and I was just a little bit jealous because you could see the farmhouse in her widget. When I made the widget to include in this post at 430, I loved it so much that I decided I wanted a big one for my header {my motto is, after all, Go Big or Go Home!}. I love it because you can see the little farmhouse down the lane and there's room for all the features this little widget offers.

The best part about it is that it can be customized. You can make it just about any size you want. It automatically adjusts the picture so you can make it narrow and tall, or wide and short, or a nice, neat square. You can select the temperature in Fahrenheit, Celsius or Autodetect {I'm assuming that it somehow knows what scale you use and automatically displays it in the units of measurement you understand}. You can choose which city it displays, or if you're living in a super-secret location you can leave that part off. And you can display it in different languages. There was quite a list -- French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, just to name a few.

So, why am I so excited about the weather ? The conditions around us, the time and temperature, are things that we habitually and often unconsciously keep track of to keep our bearings throughout the day. At a glance, my little weather widget lets you see what time it is and what the weather is like where I am. It gives you a little window into my world and I guess it makes my little piece of virtual reality a little more real.

Missão Brasil Fortaleza: Cinco por día, mais um

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories. -Florence King

Yes. I'm going to talk about MORE mission stuff . I hope you'll indulge me just a little. I promise not to bend your ear for too long. I have a few odd memories that really didn't have a place in my other posts about my mission. This post is rather disjointed and these are things of little consequence, but stick in my mind nonetheless. It is an interesting thing to be thrust in a world that is so completely different than your own.

In my first post about my mission, I showed pictures of all of my companions. I only had one picture of my first companion, Sister {Rose} Soares, with her hiding way in the back. However, I found some old rolls of film that I had developed and I found a picture of us together on my first day in Brasil. The quality of the picture isn't super, but considering it sat in my suitcase in a tropical climate for several months, and then in a drawer for 16 years, I'm really glad to have it. She was so patient and kind.

The little monkey sitting on my shoulder here was someone's pet. His name is Chico. I thought he was cute, so I asked to hold him. He climbed on me a bit and then that cheeky monkey bit me on the neck. I was a bit worried about it for a while, but it's been 15 years and I'm doing pretty OK, so no harm done, I think.

Chickens were frequently kept as pets. Here and in many other countries, hens are allowed to be kept in residential areas, but roosters are not. And I totally understand why that is a law. In Brasil, there wasn't a law about where roosters can be kept and so when the sun came up {at 6:00 every morning} the roosters would begin to crow. And they wouldn't shut up. Look at this gorgeous rooster someone had living in their yard. The colors on him were amazing, which is why I took a picture of him. Unfortunately, the film didn't quite capture his beauty.

One rule for missionaries is that you are to write your family a letter every week. I have this 'thing' for packages and letters. I love to put them together and I love to make them pretty. On my second day in Brasil, I got a letter together for my family to let them know I'd arrived and was on my way. My companion and I went to the post office branch near our home so I could mail it. They only offered one choice of international stamp, and it was pretty boring. So the next time we went into the city center my companion took me to the main post office to get some pretty stamps. They didn't sell them at the main windows. We had to go into this little side office to get them. After that, I would make my companions go to the main post office to get stamps. I would buy enough to mail my letters for that week and the next because we would only make a trip into the city every other week. I asked my mom to save all of my letters and when I got home, I made a collage of all of the pretty stamps I'd procured during my time in Brasil. A few weeks ago, I scanned the collage in and was looking at the digital images. The quality is incredible and I can see details that were almost too small to see on the original stamps. I put together a little slide show of them, with that first boring international stamp at the beginning. One interesting thing about stamps in Brasil is that the cost of international postage fluctuates so frequently that they seldom print the value on the international stamps. You pay the going rate and if the rate goes up the next day, the stamp is still worth the international rate. It works like the USPS's Forever stamps.

I think I've just about wrapped up with blogging about my mission memories. I'll have some fun quilty stuff next Way Back When-sday.

Confused About Abbey Bags

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little - do what you can. -Sydney Smith

I received a question in the comments on one of my posts about the Abbey Bag pincushions. The commenter did not leave a way for me to contact them, so, I'm hoping that they will come back and see the reply here.

I saw your comments on the abbey bags that you made. I'm in the process of making one myself and I'm stuck and was wondering if you could help me! For the Outer Bag the instructions say to sew the two pieces together to form a tube. I'm confused, do I sew the 9" x 9½" to the middle of the 9" x 20" piece and have 5½" left on each end of the 20" piece or do I sew the 9" piece to the end of the 20" piece and have 11" left on one end? And then after the tube is formed do you add the gathering stitch just the top and bottom (9" side) of the 9" x 20" piece or do you stitch all the way around the two ends?

I've followed a lot of patterns over the years and some are better than others . I found the instructions for the Abbey Bags a bit confusing. Part of the trouble is they have you working with a 9" x 9½" piece, which is just too close to a square for it to clearly be a rectangle . Hopefully this will help.

• For your outer bag pieces, place them right sides together, lining up the 9" sides on one end and sew a ¼" seam on that edge.

• Bring the free 9" side of the 9" x 9½" piece so that it lines up with the free 9" side of the 9" x 20" piece and sew a ¼" seam on that edge. This forms the tube, but the seams do not divide it equally. The smaller piece will be the back of the bag and the larger piece, which will be the front, will be gathered to fit it.

• Run a basting stitch along the top and bottom edges of the 20" portion of the tube. Mark the bottom center of the 9½" piece and the 20" piece and then match them, pinning them right sides together. Pull the bobbin thread of the basting stitch so that the 20" piece is gathered evenly to match the 9½" piece and sew together along the bottom edge.

• Turn the bag right sides out. The gathers make the front all puffy and cute. The top of the bag will be gathered to fit when the lining is inserted. For now, it is OK to leave it flat.

• The back of the bag is flat.

Hopefully this helps! If you have other questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments or send them by e-mail.

Snowball Night: Week 12

I keep my end tables full of needlework and quilting so I don't have to dust them. -Unknown

Are you bored of seeing the same partly finished snowball blocks yet? Because I'm running out of clever ways to display them for photographing.

I've got three corners on 48 blocks, which is the equivalent of 36 finished blocks if I had divided the blocks out to finish a fourth of them each week instead of doing one corner every week. I think if I had decided to finish a fourth of them at a time, I may have skipped a week or two here and there and not made as much progress because there would be nothing partially finished and waiting for me to work on it. This way, I have to work on the blocks a bit each week because it bugs me knowing that they are sitting in the cabinet partially finished. I'm working at a slower pace on this quilt than I did the first, but still looking forward to finishing it so I can have my own to snuggle under.

On a different, but not altogether unrelated note, I guest posted over at Stash Manicure today. Rae Ann had this clever idea to populate a blog with ideas from lots of different quilters on how they manage scraps and stash fabrics. Since my snowball quilts are made from my stash {except for the fabric I bought with a 50% off coupon for the sashing, binding and back, which I think is completely reasonable -- most stash pieces are not large enough for those things}, making them somewhat relevant to the theme of her blog, I took Rae Ann up on her offer to post. It was a lot of fun and I have really enjoyed reading through the comments today. I noticed I have a couple of new followers! Welcome ! And for all of you who have been reading my madness for a while now, thanks for sticking with me .

I'm putting the snowball quilt away until next week {it kind of keeps it interesting to only work on it one day a week} and I'm going to see if I can make some headway with my pinwheel sampler. It is time to spread it out on the living room floor put it up on my design wall and find the perfect arrangement for those fabulous pink and brown pinwheels.