New Starts

It seems appropriate to me that the Jewish New Year is celebrated in September; it has always seemed to me that September was the start of the new year instead of January. I suppose it was because of school starting and the relief of cooler weather after the exhausting heat of summer. Here's to new starts for all of us.

We spent the Labor Day weekend in Denver (actually Wheatridge) at my oldest daughter, Michal Ann's home. She had her new deck, overlooking the back yard and facing the Rocky Mountains, constructed but not sealed yet. It was a vast improvement over the old rickety and splintery one. It was so great to visit with family and watch the grandchildren and great grandchildren play, as well as snuggling our new great grandson, Shaun. It is a blessing that he is such a good baby, who allows Lindsay and Derek to get 5 hours of unbroken sleep at night. 5 year old sister Kaylee is very proud of him.

It was a special treat for me and my farmer father to get the grand tour of Lindsay's and Derek's veggie garden and punkin patch. This is their first garden on their nearly acre lot, that was the home place of the original homestead in this area of Wheatridge in the days when it was still an agricultural community, rather than a contiguous suburb of Denver. For beginner's their garden was impressive. I am so thrilled and excited that this love of growing things is passing on down in the family. Look at the cantaloupes in their own little pantyhose hammocks. Derek liked my heirloom Little Yellow Pear and Green Zebra Tomatoes so much that he wants me to save seeds for him to plant next summer.

I'm also amazed that my daughter, Kat (Mandy's mom), has been bitten by the quiltmaking bug. She has hand stitched all her nine-patch blocks together and is in the process of adding the borders and talking about getting fabric to start another quilt. She is hoping to take some lessons at the quilt shop in the neighboring community of Strasburg. She loves to hand stitch while watching TV with the family in the evenings. I had thought that the love of quilting had jumped a generation but am pleased that one of my daughters is now into quilting as well as my granddaughter.

The veggie garden was full of goodies ready to pick when we got home from Denver. We had so many tomatoes that I took some to the gals at the doctor's office when I went in for an appointment this week. A big portion of the joy of gardening is having enough to share with others. [Tigger just jumped up onto the keyboard and typed some gibberish so I had to put him back down on the floor and do some editing.] Those round yellow things in back are the lemon cucumbers.

Now that I have completed the Women of the Bible study, I have started a Praying the Names of Jesus study and quilt group online. We are using Ann Spangler's book, "Praying the Names of Jesus" as our daily guide. The leaders of the Yahoo group are the Canadian woman who led my WOTB4 group and one of the U. S. women who was also a member of that group and they have chosen wonderful blocks to represent the names. While I've been doing the daily studies, I didn't get around to making any of the blocks until today. I had purchased a group of gorgeous, rich patterned fat quarters at the Creative Cloth Closet that I thought would be good for these blocks and last week found a couple of cream on cream fabrics to go with them. This evening I was able to cut out, fuse and stitch this weeks block, Morning Star, for the name, Bright Morning Star. I'm only 12 blocks behind, but I will get caught up, hopefully soon.