Saturday, March 19, 2011

Happy Birthday Relief Society

In March we celebrate the birthday of the Church's women's organization, the Relief Society. This week we had our dinner and service auction, which is always a fun event. Each sister is encouraged to bring a service idea or item to auction and we bid with points earned from a check sheet of various items.
Here a sister put together a stationary caddy complete with stamps, cards and even some small mailing containers! I wish I had gotten this since I am going to be sending mail to a missionary in the near future!Another sister makes really cute hair clips.
There were so many cute handmade items, aprons, baby quilts, bonnets, crocheted pot holders, knitted mittens, scarves, knitted headbands, doll clothes, gourmet food items ...

I loved this little emergency FHE kit!
Baby quilts!

I ended up with this nice handmade bread basket! Complete with bread and some lovely hand made paper dolls for a special little girl!

Other service items included: private Zumba classes, photography sessions, yard clean up (which is a big deal here if you have a pet going outside all winter!), airport rides, dinners and baked goods on demand, singing telegrams, carpet cleaning, and custom jewelry.
We have so many talented sisters in our ward!
And I can take a deep breathe until next month when we set up for Women's Conference. But I'm not thinking about that right now.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

My Latest Addiction

This little outfit is the one that disappeared from the end of the blog. Start reading from the next line.

A friend of mine asked me to make her a doll outfit in exchange for this adorable knitted sweater. She had seen the ones I made for Savvy's birthday and thought they were cute. What could I say but YES YES YES! So I stitched up a cute pair of bell bottom jeans to match (not the mom jeans we started out with!) and a cute shirt is on the way. So cute! But it led to sort of sewing frenzy where we just couldn't stop ourselves.

Most of these are outfits for Savvy's new doll,





but these last two are for tomorrow night's Relief Society Service Auction, an annual event where all the sisters bid on services, or items up for auction. So these cute jammies.....

and this little outfit (see first photo) are going up for auction. I'm having a hard time parting with them, but hopefully they will make a little girl happy and my part is over! Yay! Oops.
My blogging skills are very rusty!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

And there is Grandpa!
And we really do have ancestors from Ireland, Cork County to be exact.
I have the cutest picture of Grandpa but for some reason it insists on showing up sideways even though it looks okay on the computer. Whatever. Maybe tomorrow it will straighten out. Anyway, corned beef and roasted veggies with cabbage slaw, chocolate cake with green sprinkles and green apple sparkling drink. On green flowered dishes. And I wore a green skirt to work. I think that just about covers it. Yummy! But fattening. The food, not the skirt. The skirt was just tight. Hope your day was tip top!

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Spring Break

It's Spring Break in Anchorage so I took a day off and went to Seward with Dick. We have some good friends there who are moving out of state and this was probably our last chance to see them, so we met for lunch and had a great time.
It really was a nice day for me because I had the whole day to do whatever I wanted - so I drank a huge mug of cocoa at the Starbuck's in the Carrs grocery store and looked at quilting and sewing magazines for an hour and a half. But unlike most of the customers there, I actually bought a couple instead of just bending the pages and putting them back on the shelf as if I was at the library. It was a great use of time to plan out some future gifts and projects.
After lunch I spent the afternoon in Dick's little apartment reading the Ensign magazine and pondering the next five years and if perhaps I should consider a more minimalist lifestyle. This topic has come up a few times lately in different settings, once at church, once in a conversation with Dick and I, and in a conversation I had with one of the female instructors at Avtec yesterday. Her and her husband have lived on a boat, own no home, and spend two months every summer traveling on the water. Hmm. Probably a little too minimalist for me, I mean, what if people come to visit? Or you want to have people over for dinner? And they have no children and I do.
But I did pause to consider if there are things in my life that are keeping me from doing the things I would like to do or want to do or would like to be able to do in the future and what changes I need to make. I remember when Dick and I were first married and living in Germany, we had almost nothing, and bought almost nothing (except a lot of stereo equipment!) so we could spend our resources traveling and seeing things we might never have the opportunity to see again. I don't regret it for a minute. Now I have a house full of stuff I only use when I have company.
The closer we get to retirement the more we consider what we really need and what we can live without. And this could be said for all of our baggage, mentally and physically.
So Yay for spring break and getting away and being able to explore our many options!
Now if spring would just come!