When You Know Where To Look

They say an elephant never forgets. Not being an elephant, I forget things all the time. I would blame my age or my health but I have always been forgetful AND unorganized - a deadly combination. My poor husband has not gone a day without hearing "where's my?" or "have you seen?" since he married me. 

My mom used to encourage me to be more organized and to put things away before I moved on to the next distraction. She would tell me: "It's easy to find when you know where to look." If I put things in sensible places, it would be easy to find them when I needed them. 

This past week has been a stellar memory week total memory fail. I spent at least an hour looking for this so I could work on some quilt block ideas for the Mitendi Center. Just about the time I told myself that if the girls at the center can cut fabric without a rotary cutter then I jolly well can too, I finally found them.

I also spent an hour (or two) looking for the receipts from last month's water and electric bills. Now utility receipts are one thing I never lose because it is a humongo hassle here if for some random reason the utility company decides to claim you never pay your bills and threatens to cut you off and you can't produce your receipts. But I couldn't find them anywhere. Later as I was going through a shelf I saw a folder I didn't remember the purpose of and opened it to find our utility receipts. Then I remembered selecting that folder specifically for keeping the receipts in so that they would be easy to find if I ever needed them. Aaagh! 

My family and close friends, if you are reading this, I know you are shaking your heads at me but are not at all surprised. 

Not being able to find things isn't always my fault. We went downtown on Saturday to shop for a phone for my birthday. At the first store we tried, an employee told us that the phone I wanted but wasn't willing to pay their price for could be purchased at a significant savings if we bought it at a different store. He even called ahead to make sure the phone was in stock and to guarantee the price. Then he told us where to go. 

We thought we understood his directions but we ended up in a part of the city where there were lots of police (not a good thing in Congo) and after going down several ONE WAY streets the wrong way (in our defense, they were not labeled) and having no success finding the store, we decided to just head home. As we turned a corner to get back out on the main road, lo and behold, there was our store! It's easy to find when you know where to look, which we didn't.

After we got home I wanted to finish what I had begun with my sewing, so once I concluded my search for the iron, I managed to do these. Both are a type of crazy quilt square. I am not sure yet how I will use them.

I am so glad I DO know where to look when I need peace, direction, comfort, strength, or forgiveness. I don't have to search frantically for Jesus because He is always with me and He never loses his own. I just have to call out his name. 

Stitches Tell Stories

Every quilt has a story. I began this quilt in Tulsa, OK. We were preparing for the mission field and David was in school full-time, so my fabric budget was pretty limited. The best way to keep enjoying my new hobby and learning new skills was to do those $5-$10 block of the month clubs at the fabric stores. I did them all  - three different stores – simultaneously. One of those was this quilt.

We moved to Florida, then Missouri. In each place I worked a little on the quilt top but never finished. Other quilts took priority because they were gifts for other people. Eventually we moved to Quebec, Canada to attend French language school. We had to fit everything we owned for a family of five into a mini-van, which called for some serious paring down, but I managed to fit my sewing machine and quilt blocks! While we were there, I finally completed the top. I packed her up and took her to Africa, thinking that I would quilt it there.

We only have power about 30% of the time in Kinshasa. When the electricity is on I find myself racing to get laundry, school stuff, baking, bill paying, blogging, correspondence, etc done before it goes off again.  I began to wonder if I was EVER going to finish it. David suggested I send it back to the states and have someone quilt it for me. When our son came to visit for Christmas, I did send it back with him, but it went into storage for a while, waiting for me to decide what to do with it.

During our time in Florida, a friend from our college days was going to be nearby for a conference and asked if we’d like to drive up to see him and meet his family. We had not seen Darren in over fifteen years and were very excited. I liked his wife Marcia instantly. It was so fun to discover how much we have in common and we parted feeling like we had been friends for much longer than just an evening. We’ve kept in touch ever since. Once I made the decision to have my quilt done by someone else, Marcia was the obvious choice. I trusted her and I had been admiring her work for some time via her blog.

This quilt has journeyed across the U.S. and the ocean with me and I have a lot in common with her. We are both a work in progress, a slow progression getting a little closer to being useful and beautiful at each stop along the way. Neither of us are the same as we were seven years ago when I began working on this quilt.

I named her “Je me souviens,” which means “I remember,” because she reminds me that through the years I spent finishing her I made new friends, reconnected with old friends, learned new skills, travelled to new places, learned a new language, lived at seven different addresses, encountered two new cultures, faced several challenges, and said many goodbyes. She’s even more special now because of the love and talent stitched into her by my friend Marcia – a constant reminder of our friendship even though we both worked on her at different times and in different places. 

Here is a pic of the back of my quilt. It's almost a quilt all by itself! The photo really doesn't do justice to all the detail and colors. 

Marcia also graciously allowed me to use her photos. 

You can read her blog and see some of the other work she has done by clicking HERE.

You can shop in Marcia's store by clicking HERE.

Stitches tell stories, and this quilt has a lot of both!

Almost a Graduate and Almost a Quilt

Remember this quilt top? There's a story to tell that I will share later, but I am just about jumping up and down with excitement because my top is finally getting quilted!

This is my fifth quilt (you can see the other four by clicking on the My Quilts tab at the top of this page). I quilted the first four on my own, one by hand and the rest on my traditional sewing machine. I never seemed to have enough time and electricity to get to this one though, and it is the first one I decided to keep for myself so it got put on back burner. I guess I could have hand quilted it but I just didn't want to. I would pull it out and look at it longingly because I love the batiks and this quilt kept calling me. Finally I caved and decided to take it back to the states when I took Josh back for college and hire a quilter. It got stored for another year partly due to cost and partly because I was nervous about putting my quilt top in the mail.

Ultimately I chose my dear friend Marcia, of Little Pink Rose Quilting and Sewing to be my quilter. Marcia and I have been friends for several years, and her husband has been friends with David and me even longer - we went to college together.

You can get a sneek peak at Marcia's work on my quilt by clicking HERE. It goes without saying that I will post about this quilt again when it is finished and then I'll share why it is special to me.

Meanwhile, we are busy packing and preparing for furlough. Tonight our daughter graduates from high school. We are so proud of her!

I have a glitchy camera and unfortunately will probably have to rely on my friends for good photos and it will take a few days to round them up and post about it. So I wrote a post a while back and scheduled it to publish tomorrow automatically. The blog posts will probably slow down quite a bit after that until we get to the states.

Emily's Loose Ends

I'm trying hard to wrap up more loose ends before we travel. This being her last year of high school and also her last few weeks in Congo, pretty much everything in our life revolves around Emily right now and that's ok. I started this rug for Emily during Christmas break and I injured my thumb in January before I finished the rug. I still have some trouble with my thumb but it is steadily improving. It's finished now, in part because I ran out of the fabric she chose out of my stash. It was intended to match her blue and brown bedroom, which she is moving out of in less than three weeks. Oops.

With Emily in mind I also went in search of a tutorial for a more feminine bag to sew, and found

this one at Craftser. After the interfacing disappointment of my last zipper bags, I wanted to use quilted fabric for this one to give it more stability. This meant I had to make my own pre-quilted fabric, which meant re-learning how to use my walking foot that had not seen the light of day since language school. Poor foot, went to sleep in chilly Canada and woke up in Africa. 

I was in a hurry and it is a small bag so I only quilted on the vertical. I had some of that radical green left over from Daniel's quilt top, which perfectly matched the green in the TASOK fabric, so I used that for the lining.





I fussy cut one side to make sure the word "TASOK" was all there. This was my first experience with making a bag like this and with shortening a zipper, which turned out to be no big deal. There was a lot of bulk at the zipper corners even after I trimmed the seams but I think it is not too bad for a first effort.

 I like that it is wider on the bottom so it holds more stuff!

The uber-green lining!

I'm also packing and cleaning but no one wants to read about those things, or write about them. But look, I just did.

Languishing Brownies

Brownies (Photo credit: yum9me)

This could be an interesting post because I am so distracted. We HAD power today, so I made up a batch of brownie batter. I decided to be a cool mom and used the last of our Heath bits in the brownies. Popped them into the oven. A few minutes later the power went off. David went out to check the box since all of the neighbors have power and he has been gone awhile, which means something burnt up and we can't even run the generator. MY BROWNIES ARE LANGUISHING!!! 

This week I ordered limes from Papa Joseph. In French, lemons are "citrons" and limes are "citrons vertes (green)". This is a photo of locally grown produce. The little one is a lime and the big ones are lemons. See the problem with calling limes the green ones? They are ALL green. Papa Joseph misunderstood and I ended up with a bag of lemons. Lemons aren't as tasty as limes in my Coke, but they made good lemonade so we are just rolling with it. Interestingly, oranges here are also green, and yet they are still called oranges an no one seems to think that is weird.

Here's an update on our house. Yes, we are STILL working on the house. When we moved in, the plumbing in the kitchen had been repaired/replaced and there was a section behind the sink where the tiles were busted out; and there was a gap between the concrete wall and the countertop that I could put my hand into - which meant unwelcome guests could crawl through from the other side. This week we hired Leopold to fix the wall and I am very happy to have a whole wall in the kitchen now.





I managed to get some more sewing time and made some progress on Daniel's quilt top. I am using a pattern called Blissful Dreams that I purchased too many years ago from Down Home Quilting. I still have to add borders to it. Daniel asked me to hand quilt it instead of machine quilting it, so when I finish the top it will get packed away until after furlough. I don't plan to haul it across the ocean and then add backing and batting and haul it back. Apologies to my facebook friends who have already seen this.


***Here is a brownie update, because brownies are important. They are a little funny looking but I think they will taste just fine. Hooray for brownies! The neutral line in our box keeps burning up and we keep replacing it. This time it burned a bunch of stuff and David got it going temporarily but says he pretty much has to replace everything.

Wired

creation window (Photo credit: mtsofan)

I am becoming quite the "handy Andy." When sparks were flying out of our breaker box in the house a couple of weeks ago, I had two choices. Remove the burning wires, or do without my precious electricity until David got home. Round here, when the power is on, you don't waste it! So I got my nerve up and pulled this out of our box and set us up to run on just one phase until hubby could make repairs. Yes, I cut off the power before I touched the wires.


These wires couldn't take the heat. They frayed and burned, ending up useless and dangerous.

We have had a week of sickness. First Daniel, then Emily, now David. I am the "last man standing." We have also had a week of twice going over 48 hours without power and several days of only getting an hour or two at a time. Not having a/c is inconvenient in this heat, but when someone has a fever, it's miserable. I felt so sorry for the kids.



During Daniel's sick time, I had to run the generator anyway to keep the fridge cold, and since I wasn't home schooling I decided I might as well sew. Having finally finished making curtains for the living room (it only took two and a half years), I pulled out a quilt project.

This is going to be for Daniel, if I ever finish it. While I was in the states for my surgery he got to choose his own fabric. I finally completed all of the blocks. Now I just have to assemble them and add borders.

This one is my favorite and Daniel's too. Of course, it was also the one that took the most time and care because of all the points there were to match up. Half square triangles are not my strong point. I have to do them slowly and carefully.

 The closer we get to finishing it, the more eager Daniel and I both are to see how it will turn out.

There is just something about working at a project and really putting yourself into it, and then being able to look at the finished product and see its beauty that makes you feel really good. God understands that. It's why He keeps working on us, carefully and sometimes slowly - and doesn't stop until he completes the good work He started. It's why when He finished creating the world He took time to notice that it was good. We are just wired to get pleasure out of doing good work.

I hated that my family has been suffering with the fluish like bug that has hit them, but the forced down time has probably been good for us. We've rested. We've done things we don't usually get time for like reading and sewing. Maybe we were really feeling the heat, literally and figuratively, and about to burn up like those wires. Naturally, my idea of down time would have been different from God's. Mine would include electricity and high enough voltage to use my oven and my dryer, but then I would have filled that time with work, trying to catch up on laundry and bake ahead for the "no power days." It would have been "do time" instead of "down time."

Destination: Nkara, part 1

We set off on Friday to visit our dear friends Jim and Nancy Smith. The Smiths have served in the Nkara area of the Bandundu province for many years and still spend a good part of each year here in the Congo.  When they are here, they live in the home that Jim's father built, and oversee a Bible school and a literacy center for women.  They also work in evangelism and operate a Christian radio station.

Friday was a day of firsts for us. For the first time since arriving here in October 2010, our family was leaving Kinshasa together.  A sad first for me was realizing that this was our first big family event without Josh there to enjoy it with us.  Emily, Daniel, and I were taking our first ride in an MAF plane. We got to experience what it is like for an MAF passenger to go through the airport - including getting weighed.  You can't lie about your weight because the scale is right there in the office!  An overweight plane is a huge safety risk. So we all had our first public weigh-in. (insert smiley emoticon here)

Before we even got on the plane, I was blessed to get to meet Miriam Noyes.  Miriam and her husband Ed are missionaries who live and work a few miles outside of Vanga.  Miriam was taking the MAF plane home, so while we waited we got to talk and get to know each other a little bit.

Here are a few photos from day one of our trip.

The Cessna 206 we flew out in, "Mike Romeo." After hearing David talk about repairs and inspections he has done on each of the planes, it was pretty cool to get to ride in one, even for a person who is not fond of flying in small planes.

I wasn't the only one who was excited to be on our way to Nkara!

The trees grow where the water collects, in the low places.  Being a quilter, this view made me think of stippling, as if the land were a giant quilt.

This house was built by Jim's dad. Jim met us at the runway and drove us to the house, where a big breakfast was waiting for us.  Nkara is a MYOE place (make your own electricity).  The Smith's have a generator for their well, another for the house, and a battery powered water pump so that they can have water inside the house even when the generator is not on.  They run the generator for a few hours each evening to charge batteries and have lights.  The refrigerator and stove run on propane, and they have a ringer washer.  Nancy Smith told us that she thinks it is easier in some ways to live in the interior because the electricity in Kinshasa is so random and at her house it is very predictable since there is none except for the generator.

After breakfast we looked around a bit and spent some time just relaxing and visiting with the Smiths.  In the evenings while the generator was on, we watched a video.  It is not as hot in Nkara as it is in Kinshasa so we slept pretty comfortably even without power, but we had battery powered fans if we needed them.

To be continued....

part 2

part 3

part 4

Six THOUSAND Words

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a recap in pictures of what we've been up to.  There are six photos, so I figure this is a 6,000 word essay.  The photo above was taken at the orphanage in Kimbondo by Daniel.  This week we had great power and terrible water.  As the days went by with still no city water we kept conserving, and the laundry piled up.  Then on Thursday we finally had water coming in again so by default it instantly became laundry day.  The goal was to finish as much as possible before the power or water shut off. We ended up losing both, but not before six loads of clothing were finished!  I am grateful not just for the clothing we have and the ability to get it washed, but also that I don't have as much laundry to do as you see in the photo.  Hundreds of kids means the laundry is NEVER done!

We found a home for one of our kittens (not the one pictured).  We still have four left and really can't keep them so please pray for good homes for the kitties.

Tuesday evening our ladies Bible study group had a potluck with a Mexican theme to celebrate having completed our latest book study.  Two in our group have furloughs this summer and others will be traveling so we are likely taking a break for a while.

We've been reading Henry Reed, Inc. in school together.  Daniel enjoys the author's sense of humor and relates well to the main character, Henry Reed, because in the story Henry is an expat who has spent most of his life abroad.  As a family we've been reading Monster in the Hollows out loud.  This is the third in a series by Andrew Peterson and we've thoroughly enjoyed them all.  They are full of adventure, humor, and virtue.  The author is the same Andrew Peterson who wrote my favorite Christmas album Behold the Lamb of God.

We went to the orphanage Friday and played with the kids! 

Since I couldn't do laundry, I took advantage of the electricity and worked on my quilt project.  I finished 64 4-patches, 16 9-patches, and 64 quarter square triangles.  

Graduation

Josh graduated from high school a few weeks ago and I thought I had already posted photos of it. Oops. Here are a few of my favorites. The ceremony was very nice, including a special by the high school choir. There were bittersweet moments. TASOK is a school of students from many countries and cultures, and the seniors are spreading out all across the world instead of across the country. Josh has had to say a lot of goodbyes. The next few posts will be short ones because now that we have electricity part of each day again, I am working feverishly on a quilt for Josh that I began back in the dark ages - 2005. It has spent more time in storage than it has on my sewing table, but I hope to be able to send it back to the U.S. with him when he goes.

A Quick Catch-up

Ok. Learning a foreign language when you are an adult with a family to take care of and two kids still homeschooling is a WEE bit time-consuming. And where there is time, there is no energy. SO - I have neglected all of my hobbies, including my blog. We have completed the beginner and intermediate level courses as of two days ago. On Monday, we will begin the conversation course. This course is not quite as intense as the others, so I am hoping to be able to communicate better with my family and friends and maybe even deal with a few photos or do a little quilting. Here is the best rapid-fire catching-up I can give you. In August, on our way from Missouri to Québec, we spent some time with my parents and I gave her the quilt I had been working on for the last five years.


We began school the first week of September. In Canada, Thanksgiving Day is in October, so while our loved ones in the U.S. were observing Columbus Day, we were having our Thanksgiving feast with the other missionary families.

For Christmas, a couple from our church here invited us to spend the day with them. They treated us like family and we had a wonderful time. They can speak English well, but they make us practice our French as much as we can. It is a huge blessing to have friends like them here while we are far from our own families.

In January, we began the intermediate course, what our professor calls "the true French". It was quite a bit more challenging than the beginner course. God blessed us with more friends and more opportunities to practice conversing in French, which seems to be the most difficult part of learning French. Reading and listening skills came more easily.

"Spring break" for us came the first week in March, while it was definitely still winter here. We took a day and drove to Québec city, the capitol. We walked all through Old Québec and toured the parliament building. Québec is the only fortified city in North America.

After exams were over this week, six of the language school students graduated. We have developed close friendships with some of them and are very sad to see them go.

Finished!

Last Friday, I finished a big project that I have literally been working at off and on for five years. I will eventually post a photo but I can't yet. I can't even say what it is yet, because I plan to give it to someone who happens to read my blog. I just had to write about how excited I am to finally have it finished! What a good feeling!

Yesterday we worshipped at Mt. Auburn Christian Church in Cape Girardeau. We didn't realize until we got there that it was their Sunday to present their vacation Bible school program. What a great service! The kids sang that you don't have to be big, or strong, or smart or great for God to use you. You just have to be willing. It's a very elemental truth, one that most Christians learn early, but one that we often need a refresher in. It is such a joy to see so many seeds of Truth planted in young hearts!

***UPDATE***You can now see my completed quilt project HERE.

Cowboy Daniel

One of my favorite web sites is www.scrapbookmax.com . I scrap for a hobby and a couple of years ago I discovered digital scrapbooking. I was skeptical at first, then I decided to try it. Now I am totally hooked. My papers, embellishments, templates, etc, fit neatly into my computer until I am ready to print pages. I can use each paper, pattern, frame, embellishment, etc an unlimited number of times. I can even scrap when I am traveling via my laptop. And clean up is EASY! Overall it is also less expensive, which leaves me more money for my other hobby, quilting. Each week the designers at Scrapbook Max present a challenge that is intended to help you learn more about digital scrapbooking and how to maximize what you can do with your software. I happen to use their software because it is very reasonably priced and user friendly. The challenge last week was to randomly select a photo from our files and scrap it. I landed on this one of Daniel. It was in a file of "undated" photos and I haven't decided yet whether I took this photo in fall 2003 or spring 2004. Other than the missing date, I really liked how this turned out. I used a kit called "All American Cowboy" by Yardbunny.