OWOH Giveaway Result and Challenge Check #6

One World One Heart Giveaway Result:

Voila! Le chapeau avec les people who entered giveaway de moi!

Music...Jaws? da da da da da da da da....

Et le Winner Fabulouso is....

Amanda31Gifts!! Hooray! Hooray!

But because so many folks entered I thought I'd draw three more names and send you each un petit cadeau surprise! So....cue more tense music....I am sending a surprise each to-

jonaks, Andrea and Becca-Bluebird Rose!

Congratulations! And I'll email and post to you later today!

To be honest, I didn't really 'get' the whole giveaway thing at first, but now I see it's such fun that I think I'll do another one soon for my regulars...does that make me sound like a Bar?? Oops!

Another thing- I aim to visit all of you who entered in the weeks to come, and I'm sorry for not visiting you during the Magic Carpet Ride.

Challenge Check #6

For this week's Dottie Angel Challenge I dug out a hoarder box of scraps to start a quilt. I thought there would be lots of floral so I was going to do a Log Cabin sunshine and shadows layout,

but when I opened the box it was almost all plain pinks,

...so I chose a magazine pattern to try out

I've never worked with so much pink in my life but am finding it quite challenging, and enjoyable, to get the effect I want with a limited palette.

All my quilts are scrap quilts, as I think I've said before, as fabric in East Africa and also here is very dear. But that suits my 'something for nothing' philosophy and also my 'sustainability' beliefs. God gave us the earth to care for, not squander its resources, and I am very very happy to use other's leftovers, I'm not an artist or needing this and that special item for my perfect masterpiece. If I was a settler I'd be the one rooting through your waste sweepings picking out bits of fabric to reuse.

Remember the lovely fabric which Ulla sent me? It'll be worn out from stroking soon as I can't bear to cut it up!!!

And the CED Challenge?

Well I was going to write something different, and then on Saturday I opened a wrongly labelled box (it said 'Purple and Mauve Floral') and found some hoarded baby clothes!

Dilly's first boots and slippers, both of which were sent to her in East Africa from here by my Mom...they're so small! The collar I cross-stitched for Sos when she was a baby to go with a very plain pink dress I made her. It may sound silly but I so wanted my babies to look pretty when we went to Church but we were dependant upon the Missionaries for anything which wasn't a bare necessity. Someone gave me a piece of pink corduroy and a scrap of Aida cloth and Sos got a Sunday outfit!

And this is a later Sunday dress I made for Sos from some Viyella fabric Mom had hoarded which my Godmother had sent her when I was born to make a dress for me! Mom made one dress, and then I made the second!

At the time I was into smocking, as you can see, but my girls have long since refused to wear smocked dresses, which isn't surprising, but I so love doing smocking!

Anyhow, I'm not sure if these are relevant to CED but I thought they would interest you!

And now I'm off for another cup of tea, then to email all the winners, and then to carry on sewing together chopped up bits of cloth!!!

Challenge Check #5

First- yesterday our Rector began his sermon by reading out this...you've just gotta read it!!

Dottie Angel Challenge- two items:
A Barter/Swap Scheme- for the idea see here, and for the follow up see here.
You people are so encouraging that I’m going to run with it on Wednesday this week and see what happens! Keep me posted please?!

For the Fertilizer Factory now set up in my back kitchen see here!

Creative Every Day Challenge

After some thought about February’s topic ‘Home’ this is where I’m beginning:

For me the idea of home doesn’t revolve around a house but the places where I feel at home. Until I was five we lived in the States, in Virginia, then California, returning to Ireland in 1969. Then in 1977 when I was 13 years old, my family left Ireland due to Dad’s work, and I didn’t live here again until July of the year 2000. I lived in London, Malvern, Bath, Nairobi, the Rift Valley and Thika, worked or spent time in Paris, the Pyrenees, Donegal, and other places I’ve since forgotten. I was privileged to come into contact with people of many nationalities and faiths, to become relatively fluent in French and Kiswahili, to mix with cultures I hadn’t previously encountered, and to travel all over East Africa.

But, and to me as the years progressed it became an increasingly huge ‘but’, in all those years I felt displaced, disconnected, a free radical ?! I gave the problem a lot of thought and it seemed to me that perhaps at heart I was actually Irish, and I needed to try living there to see.

As you can imagine, uprooting an African husband and three bush babies was no joke, but we did it and not one of us regrets the change. The Hub is still an African, but since the Irish in general are utter eccentrics he fits right in, and two of the bush babies turned out to be more Irish than African. The eldest bush baby revels in her dual personality and knows she can return to East Africa whenever she likes.

So to me, ‘home’ is an ordinary seaport town in the west of Ireland with river, mountains, lakes and ocean all around me:

Hazelwood.
Benbulben.
On Keelogyboy looking towards Lough Gill and the Ox Mountains.
Streedagh beach, this morning.
Streedagh beach looking towards Gleniff.

A lonely beech tree in Grange Village, this morning.

Rosses Point Village.

Hyde Bridge, Sligo town facing down stream to the sea.
Yes, here, I’m home.