Middle School Mission Trip to Mesa, AZ

Elevate, the youth group for 6th, 7th and 8th graders at our church is emphasizing service to others this year.  So far, they've served a meal at Mary's Kitchen, packed Boxes of Love with supplies for Thanksgiving meals and went caroling to several of the older members' homes at Christmas Time among other things. On the 2nd thru 5th of this month, Janice and Kyleigh went along on their first mission trip.

This is what their leader posted on Facebook when they returned.

Amazing weekend taking 36 middle school students and 15 adults to Mesa, AZ to do a serving weekend. It was truly a ministry highlight. On Friday, my city kids did fantastic working at the barn at Sunshine Acres Children's Home cleaning up after animals and moving hay. We took a tour of this amazing 120 acre property with 7 homes, which house 70 children who might otherwise not have a home. Saturday morning they worked in thrift shops and visited nursing homes. Saturday afternoon was fun exploring Goldfield Ghost Town panning for gold, zip-lining and touring the mine tunnel. Our last service project was a personal favorite, packaging food at Feed My Starving Children. Thanks to my good friend Celeste Koski at St. Luke Lutheran church for helping make this dream a reality and for housing us. Praise God we arrived home today tired but fulfilled.

The Whole Group Getting Ready to Leave

The 6th Grade Van - Kyleigh's in the back

Sorting Incoming Items at a Thrift Shop

More at the Thrift Shop

The Group at the Nursing Home

At Goldfield Ghost Town

More at the Ghost Town

Packing Food for Feed My Starving Children

Both Janice and Kyleigh came home exhausted, but both had fun.  Janice said there's another trip being planned for 2022 and Kyleigh's already said she'll go.

A Finished Quilt and a New SAL

I've posted before that some of my stitching goes to charity stitching groups to be made into quilts.  I stitched this little dog for a SAL with Quilts for Older Children and Adults  (Q4OC).

I thought you might like to see the quilt is was used on.

Bottom portion showing my square

The whole quilt

I've also joined a new SAL from Peppermint Purple on Facebook.  It's a 52-part blackwork SAL that comes out every Wednesday and can be found here.

This is the first part.  The SAL will be done on 14-count white Aida and this part is done in DMC Variations 4022.  I originally intended to do it all in this color, but now I'm thinking of doing each block in a different DMC Variations or maybe alternating several colors.

Happy Dance - Happy New Year Mouse

Started: 1/1/2020

Finished: 1/3/2020

6 hrs. 43 minutes

Furry Tales are small mice doing human things designed by Lucie Heaton and appear monthly in the World of Cross Stitching magazine.  This one was in issue #276.  

It's stitched on 14-count white Aida as charted with the called for colors.  The yellow is Anchor and the rest are DMC.

The plan right now is to stitch one a month and send them to WOCS to be made into a quilt.  I have one for March and one for August(?) already stitched.

Next Up: Mill Hill Charmed Santa Face - St. Nicholas

 

Happy Birthday, Devin!

Today is my son-in-law's birthday.  Since Janice and Kyleigh are out of town, we will be celebrating our birthdays together on Monday this year.  We usually do celebrate them together and choose a mutually agreeable restaurant, but this year since we're celebrating on my 70th birthday, he's letting me choose.

Last year for his 40th birthday, he chose to go to Johnny Reb's, a southern style restaurant where you shell peanuts and throw the shells on the floor.  Sadly, they've closed the one near us.  They had a tradition/ceremony for those celebrating a birthday there. 

First, you have to kiss a metal pig, but you have a choice as to whether you kiss his nose or his ass.  Kissing his ass gives you good luck for a whole year so guess where Devin kissed.  

 Then you have to dance around and stomp on all the peanut shells.

I knew they did this and didn't want to participate so I celebrated my birthday a couple of days later at Famous Dave's.  There, they sing Happy Birthday and give you a free ice cream sundae. The picture in my profile shows the size of the sundae.

Happy New Year! and End of a Rotation

 HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

I hope 2020 is good to you and yours and is happy and prosperous too!

 

We had a rather quiet New Year's Eve last night.  We have a friend who typically calls at midnight to wish us a Happy New Year and catch up on what's happened the past year.  Lately he's been calling at 9:00 PST since we're all getting older and don't usually make it until midnight.  This was the highlight of our evening.

We did manage to stay up until midnight this year; the fireworks from Disneyland were loud and long so we probably would have been awakened anyway.

I spent the evening stitching and finished the rotation on Let's Learn from Our Cats from Ursula Michael.

This is being stitched on 14-count Lite Blue Aida with my choice of colors since the original chart was in primary colors and I'm not a fan.  This is after 10 hours of stitching. 

I haven't made any official plans for the coming year, but I am going to continue with my SALs and hope to finish a few WIPs too. I have chosen a few projects I want to work on in January though and hope to stitch every day.

I'm going back to my OAAT rotation this year.  Large projects will be rotated after 10 hours, smaller projects when finished.  With a couple of exceptions, I'm planning to stitch on one project per evening.

Up next: Furry Tales Happy New Year Mouse

An Ending and a Beginning

I haven't posted in over a month and at the moment I have no desire to go back and do the necessary catch-up posts.  As today is the last day of 2019, I'm going to say that what's done is done and over with (the ending).

I'd like to thank all those who have commented on and/or read my blog this past year of ups and downs.  I have made new friends and learned a lot from you.  I've enjoyed reading your blogs too, even though I may not have commented on all of them.

Tomorrow is New Years Day, the first day of 2020  (the beginning) which I hope turns out to be a much better year for stitching, blogging and life in general. 

Of course, I couldn't leave you without a couple of pictures that have made me smile.

My son-in-law works at Home Goods and part of his job is to deliver items to a customer's car. I hope this customer had a really big car!  (Devin is on the left.) 

 We stayed at Great Wolf Lodge a couple of weeks ago and had breakfast in the Loose Moose Cafe.

I hope everyone has a Happy and Prosperous New Year!!!

2019 Advent Blog Hop - Day 10

Jo at Serendipitous Stitching has created another fun Blog Hop for us.  This time it's an Advent Calendar and I'm Day 10.

I had trouble choosing which Christmas stitch I wanted to share this year, but finally decided on this one since my first choice already showed up on Katie's blog for Day 2.

It's from the 2018 Just Cross Stitch Ornament Issue and is by Leslie Teare.  It is stitched on gold dusted 14-count Aida.  I changed all the colors; it was originally done in red and white on blue fabric, but this reminds me more of Christmas.

As for my favorite Christmas movie, I don't have one.  We rarely watch movies and I don't think I've seen a Christmas movie in years.  However, I was given tickets to the Nutcracker Ballet on Saturday and really enjoyed it, so I think I'll call that my favorite for now.