Bringing Katya home giveaway

Go to these blogs to see how you can help with adoption expenses for Katya.

The Bringing Katya home blog is here.

There's a giveaway for this quilt here.

Robins in winter

A good many years ago, a naturalist told us that robins flock together in the winter and that they migrate only regionally, so it may be that the Kentucky robins come to Ohio for the winter?  Also seeing a robin in February doesn't necessarily mean that spring is coming. Last Sunday I saw a lone robin and thought about the naturalist's information.  This last week was particularly wintry. Then on Thursday I saw the flock. I counted twelve or thirteen of them in the tree out front.




I really like that this picture came out well.  Often using digital zoom makes a picture grainy.  This one even looks good on the big computer screen.


How many do you see this tree?




I love watching birds in winter!

Mr. Squirrel day two

Mr. Squirrel was very nervous looking the first time we saw him. The next day, not so.
He must have seen me because he was totally still for a while.


Then he relaxed and enjoyed his meal.

Foto Friday--Hands

This week's photo challenge was "HANDS". Besides fabric, we've got an abundance of dolls in our family. In fact, we have way more dolls than people. As I gave the challenge some thought I knew that the dolls would play a part somehow. I had an idea based on a picture my daughter took. Her picture is here.

So I started with something similar. It was ok, but not exactly great.


I then moved the six dolls to the stairs, opened the front door for good light and took the shots from the side. I took quite a few and narrowed them down to these. They've each got a slightly different focus and I rearranged the girls for the last one. I couldn't decide which one I liked best, so you get them all.






Visit Rebecca to see other photos.

Valentine creativity

Here's a peek at what Amy captured for Valentine's Day (it was actually five days after Valentine's Day that she set this up, but who's counting?)



Go to her blog to see more. By the way, she used my Emily and Anna in her shots. :)

He's back

Although "he" might be a "she".











He was all over the place and a short amount of time. He seemed pretty skittish. Amy was able to get some pretty pictures, don't you think?

Winter Revisited

The morning after:


It took DH and hour and a half to get home from work yesterday afternoon and the same to get there this morning. God kept him safe and not stuck in his car for five hours like some others had to endure. He left work at 3:15. Normally, he would have left closer to 6:00. If he'd done that he could have been stuck like all the others. We are grateful.

"Loud" quilt top

One of the gifts I received for my birthday was a gift card to the local quilt shop. My plan is to take long-arm quilting lessons. I hope to eventually be able to rent the machine to do the quilting myself. When I asked about details of the class, I was told that I'll be quilting on one of their charity quilts at first, then once I can do that I should bring my own quilt tops to keep practicing on. It's best not to start with ones I just love and they should be about crib-size. So I dug through my stash give away pile and found some fat quarters that I only paid 50 cents for and a couple coordinating larger pieces. I then searched the internet and found a very simple pattern. Here's what I came up with.





I have to say I love it! But I'll still use it for practicing my quilting. The colors are very bold, but go together so well!

I started on a postage stamp quilt on Friday. It's slow going, sewing jelly roll strips together. I'm following the quilt-along over at p.s. I Quilt. The quilt-along itself ended a few weeks ago, so I'm using it more as a tutorial.

I sold two more coats this morning leaving only three (besides Christmas ones) in the shop, so I cut out four more today.

Birthday Cake!

Amy said I needed a cake and I think she suggested coconut flour, although I don't remember who's idea that was. At any rate, I did an internet search for coconut flour cake. The first one that came up was from The Nourished Kitchen which is a site I've been to before. There's good information about real food on this site.

The original recipe for the Coconut Cake may be found here. For my cake we made changes (of course) like not using frosting and substituting chocolate extract for the coconut flavor and orange flavor. We also cut the recipe in half to just one 8 inch layer instead of two. Amy did all the work of making it after I made those changes.

Here's our recipe:

Coconut Flour Cake
6 eggs
1 c. coconut milk
1/3 c. honey
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp chocolate extract
1 c. coconut flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp salt

1. Beat eggs, coconut milk, honey & flavorings until smooth.
2. Add remaining ingredients, beat until smooth.
3. Grease 8 inch round cake pan. (We used our stoneware pan.)
4. Pour batter into pan.
5. Bake and 350 degrees about 40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.
6. Cool completely.

There are ingredients in the cake I shouldn't have, like coconut milk and honey, but I ate it anyway and tolerated it pretty well. I limited myself to a smallish piece each day until it was gone. As for the rest of the family liking it, Amy had only one bite and refused any more. DH said it resembled souffle, sort of. My brother-in-law, who had a piece the second day, said it was different. I, on the other hand, enjoyed every bite. I guess that's what happens when one doesn't eat sweet things at all for over four years.



If you want to think I'm 462 years old, that's fine, but Amy decided there needed to be candles and this is what she came up with. I wonder how many mathematical possibilities there are in those numbers. If you want to guess at my age it wouldn't be too hard to figure out. :)

Valentine Swap

I received the AGFMB Valentine Swap items this week. Emily is modeling the dress, socks, belt and shoes that make up the outfit. There were also chocolates and a card.

Foto Friday--Valentine

This week's Foto Friday is VALENTINE. I had a couple ideas (non-fabric related).

Before my family ate up all the goodies I got a couple macro shots of the Valentine candy.




There's a little bench on our deck with hearts on it. If I took the picture today it would be totally different because the snow is all gone due to 60 degree temps we've had lately.

Grain-free biscuits

I get emails from Food Renegade and in one email from a couple weeks ago there was a recipe for grain-free biscuits.



Here's the recipe then you'll get my addition. ;-) The link to the original is here. If you go there you'll notice it's a recipe for breakfast sandwiches.

Grain-Free Biscuits

Yield: 4

The Players

* 1 cup almond flour

* 4 egg whites

* 1/3 cup grass-fed butter

* 1 t baking powder

* 1/2 t salt

The How-To

For The Grain-Free Biscuits:

In a mixer (or with a fork) combine the butter and almond flour until you have little broken up, pea-sized bits of butter distributed into the flour. Add the egg whites, salt, and baking powder. Mix to combine. Scoop the batter into 4 even portions and place onto a greased or silicone-lined baking sheet. Bake at 350F for about 20 minutes, until slightly golden.

I made it pretty much as the recipe said the first time; the only thing I did differently was to add a little more almond flour at the end. They were good, but I didn't "LOVE" them. Almond flour doesn't make a smooth textured product. The next two times I made it I added some coconut flour (instead of extra almond flour) at the end because the batter seemed a little too wet from the egg whites. This addition also improved the texture, so that now I can say that I "LOVE" them. ;-)

So I'm excited to have a bread option. I still need to not overdo which would be tempting.

Warming with Betty for Sweet Charity

A few weeks ago someone started a "Handmade--Pay It Forward" on Facebook. The first five people to comment on a post would get a handmade item from whomever posted. The people commenting would then repost and do the same for five more people. (For some reason, I had trouble getting five people to comment, so I reposted and got the last few people for which to make something.) One of the comments was from our friend Charity (she's been Amy's friend since they were little), saying that she'd participate except that she would be too busy making things to sell to raise money for Katya's adoption and for her own violin lessons. I told her I'd include her anyway. Charity has been working hard to help her mother with all sorts of things especially the cooking and sewing. (I'm sure there's more I don't know about.)

My goal is to make each person something and give it to her for her birthday. That will spread it out over this year. (That was the other part--we each have this year to complete the "Pay It Forward".) Charity's birthday is this week.

On Friday I posted a sneak peek of a quilt.

Here's the finished quilt. I did all the work myself, including the quilting which I particularly hate doing. Because quilting is something I don't do very often I don't feel like I'm very good at it and it's just plain hard to do on a regular sewing machine. OK enough whining.



Charity received the quilt today and she said she loves it! So I'm happy.

Oh and I named the quilt "Warming with Betty" because the fabric line is called Hello Betty and last week I needed a "warming" post for photo Friday, so I put the two together. Someday when I see the quilt again I need to put a label on the back with the quilt's name, my name and the year.

Making Sense of It

This article appeared in the latest issue of No Greater Joy magazine. Michael Pearl addresses some of the questions I've had about why liberals/progressives think the way they do.

Making Sense of It

Article by Michael Pearl, February 2011

The average American knows our country is being driven to extinction, and its demise is not far away. We cannot make sense of the decisions politicians make. “Stupid” comes to mind, but stupid is without pattern or purpose.

We see men and women who are highly intelligent and very well informed in political sciences, economics, business, and in history making decisions that are contrary to the best interests of the country and of the poor they claim to represent. And then there is the anti-Christian bias in the media, the courts, Hollywood, and in the pubic schools and the universities. Why? What is so threatening about the Bible and those who believe it?

The Constitution is held in as much contempt as the Bible. What is so menacing about a document that guarantees individual liberty of conscience and action, free speech, free association, and ownership and management of one’s property? The way the politicians are legislating and the courts are ruling, you would think faith and the founding Fathers are the most sinister evils to ever stand in the way of positive genetic mutations.

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; That put darkness for light, and light for darkness; That put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter”! (Isaiah 5:20)

For many years I observed the political theatre and wondered at the motivation of the American left. Lately I have come to understand that progressives are motivated by a conviction of their own righteousness. They attack Christianity and the Constitution of the United States because they stand in the way of their universal utopia. They want to save us from ourselves and our delusions. They think they are more enlightened than the rest of us and believe their understanding requires them to take charge of the helm, even if they have to kill the captain and throw some of the crew overboard.

Human salvation is thought to be in the collective. They seek the redemption and restitution of mankind in a way that assures our survival as a race. It is the Tower of Babel all over again. The kingdom builders get into politics, education, entertainment, rewriting history, and especially into the news media because that is where people are molded to a worldview that will cause them to be willing participants, or at least passive supporters, in the New World Order.

The utopitarians are trying to establish what God has already promised to institute, a kingdom of peace and happiness in a paradise where all share in the bounty of a renewed earth. They too want that kingdom, but since there is no god to determine man’s destiny, it is up to them to institute this kingdom. They abort babies to prevent increased population from placing further stress on an already overtaxed planet. They must purge society of any religion that looks to the sweet by and by, for it prevents men from getting serious about the here and now. They are anti-American because the United States supports a divided world where American exceptionalism prevents us from entering into commune with the have-nots of the third world. They must save every butterfly and lizard nearing extinction because they don’t have a God that will create more.

If they had ten commandments they would read something like this:

1. Thou shalt have no gods above thy fellow man.

2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any absolutes that cannot be ignored for the sake of the common good.

3. Thou shalt not take the name of any religion in vain, for they are all created equal.

4. Observe the holy days of all religions with equal fervor.

5. Honor the state as your father and nature as your mother, that your days may be long upon mother earth.

6. Thou shalt not kill, even in self defense.

7. Thou shalt not call consensual sex adultery or sodomy.

8. Thou shalt not steal from the poor by accumulating to thyself wealth more than thy neighbor.

9. Thou shalt not bear witness against thy government.

10. Thou shalt not covet the power that belongs to the elite.

The progressive/socialist has an anthropological world view that parallels theological doctrine. They believe in the fall of man and in depravity. Man, in oneness with mother nature, living in blissful harmony in a communal paradise of unbounded sexual license and village simplicity, fell into a selfish world of materialism and consumption, damaging mother earth.

In their confused anthropology, man is both evil and good. He is good as long as he is true to himself, following his own light and living his personal truth, not being judged by any outward standard. He is evil in that he is selfish and judgmental and therefore destructive to the collective good.

They believe in temptation. Man is tempted by the lure of independent action. He is tempted to judge his own actions and the actions of others on grounds of a supposed absolute good existing outside of human nature and independent of the material world.

To the progressives original sin is inherited by children from their parents who teach religion as a pie in the sky, sweet by and by, do it or be damned doctrine, inflicting crippling guilt.

They believe in salvation. Their new birth is forgiving oneself and acquiescing to one’s passions as normal, rejecting guilt as a foreign, dark force intruding upon their otherwise liberated souls.

They believe heaven and hell are here and now. Heaven is the new world order—the socialist’s New Jerusalem, the utopia, where there will be no more war, or pollution, or bigotry, or hunger.

Hell is fossil fuels belching out deadly gasses upon fragile Mother Nature, pollution caused by capitalism. False doctrine is unbending religion that segments people. Demons are rich business owners and judgmental religious bigots.

Liberal Socialists/Utopitarians are crusaders for salvation. To understand these kingdom builders you must recognize that they are motivated by what they consider righteousness. They think the masses, especially the political right, are evil or, at the very least, out of touch and need to be pushed into the right path. You are self-destructive and they want to commit you for your own good, thus saving mother earth, the only eternal life the human race will ever know. Surely the survival of this planet is more important than the luxury of liberty. They know that if you are not with them you are against them, and they are willing to sacrifice the few to save the many.

To make sense of the present hour:

Why are our politicians, supported by the news media and Hollywood, seemingly trying to break our country economically? It is obvious that they are deliberately legislating so as to bring about high energy and food prices. With the certain increase in population and the limited resources on this planet, they want to create a worldwide commune where population is kept in check and resources are equally shared.

But they also know that this “sharing” will never come about through legislation. It will take a revolution where shortage is the enemy, not politicians. They need crises, so they are creating the biggest crisis this world has ever known. Why? Because the creation of a new world order necessitates destroying the old one. They know we must fall and suffer before we will be willing to rise in a world with less liberty and more expensive goods and services. No one will accept legislation that results in a 75 percent cut in wages and a great reduction in his consumption of goods and services unless he first loses everything and lives in abject poverty for a while; then he will be grateful to a government that puts him in a three hour food line and allows him to live in a two room apartment that has electricity for five hours every day. During times of stress and deprivation he will gladly receive a mark upon his hand or his forehead by which he can buy food for his family.

My final word:

Don’t look to politicians to save you. Jesus will bring in the kingdom, and he will be the king of kings and the lord of lords, bringing in everlasting righteousness. Until then, pray for those in authority so we can live a quiet and peaceful life until God tires of men trying to take the kingdom by force. That is his job and he will do it soon enough.

Warming with Betty

This week's photo challenge was "warming". That Rebecca is a sly one, knowing very well just how warm it is in these parts. ;-)

In keeping with the fabric theme from last week...







It's a sneak peak at a quilt I finished today for a sweet young lady. (I'll post the whole thing soon.) It should soon be keeping her WARM.

Homeopathy

This article came in my email today.  While it's not the best article on the subject it does make some good points and explains homeopathy.  Click on the article title to go to the original source.

You can't overdose on homeopathic remedies; Why won't homeopathy skeptics drink their own medicine?

(NaturalNews) It's really quite hilarious to see this unfold: Homeopathy skeptics and vicious Big Pharma attack dogs are running around the globe in ludicrous demonstrations where they consume huge doses of homeopathic remedies in public and then claim that because they don't die of an "overdose," these medicines therefore don't work.

Notice that they never consume their own medicines in large doses? Chemotherapy? Statin drugs? Blood thinners? They wouldn't dare drink those. In fact, today I'm challenging the homeopathic skeptics and other medical fundamentalists to a "drink-a-thon" test to see which medicines will kill you faster. But we'll get to that in a minute...

First, let's get to the understanding of why the idea that you could "overdose" on homeopathic remedies is ridiculous to begin with.

It requires an elevated worldview

Teaching the so-called "skeptics" about how homeopathic medicine really works is a bit like trying to convince flat Earthers that the planet is really spherical. These skeptics, you see, approach homeopathy as if it were a drug (because that's all they really know). And in their world, all drugs are dangerous if you overdose on them, which makes sense from their point of view because they're educated solely in dangerous, synthetically-derived chemicals that are incompatible with the human body.

So it may be understandable at some level that since this is all the medical fundamentalists (skeptics) know, they have probably not attained the level of sophistication required to understand the far more advanced mechanisms of homeopathy. It's a bit like trying to teach a five-year-old child how to play Mozart. And while that may have worked if your child was Mozart, it probably doesn't work for anyone else.

Homeopathy isn't a drug

Homeopathy, you see, isn't a drug. It's not a chemical. So you can drink all you want and you won't overdose on it. That's not a defect in homeopathy -- it's a remarkable advantage! It means that while 200,000+ Americans are killed each year by toxic pharmaceutical drugs, no one is harmed by homeopathy. Not even those who are desperately trying to be harmed by it!

It seems these skeptics really want everything to be more dangerous because the world of toxicity is so much more familiar to them. What these not-so-amazing skeptics would like to see, it seems, is more people dropping dead from dangerous side effects. Then they would believe homeopathy was real.

That's the way ignorant convention medicine operates today: You know the drugs are kicking in when you start getting worse. Toxicity and conventional medicine go hand in hand.

But homeopathy isn't a chemical. It's a resonance. A vibration, or a harmony. It's the restructuring of water to resonate with the particular energy of a plant or substance. We can get into the physics of it in a subsequent article, but for now it's easy to recognize that even from a conventional physics point of view, liquid water has tremendous energy, and it's constantly in motion, not just at the molecular level but also at the level of its subatomic particles and so-called "orbiting electrons" which aren't even orbiting in the first place. Electrons are vibrations and not physical objects.

But, oh yeah, I forgot. The skeptics don't know that yet. That won't be taught that in university physics classes until probably 2020, at which point most of them will probably be dead from taking pharmaceuticals to treat their own diseases. For now, they've all convinced themselves that electrons are -- get this -- tiny "particles" flying around atomic nuclei and tremendous speeds which just happen to stay in their little orbits like little perpetual motion machines (which they say are impossible), until all of a sudden, these electron "particles" inexplicably leap to a higher or lower orbit without occupying the space in-between those orbits at any moment. Yep, magic teleporting particles! That's the "scientific" explanation of these folks. No wonder so many of them are magicians: Believing their explanations requires that you believe in particle magic!

But getting back to water and vibrations, which isn't magic but rather vibrational physics, you can't overdose on a harmony. If you have one violin playing a note in your room, and you add ten more violins -- or a hundred more -- it's all still the same harmony (with all its complex higher frequencies, too). There's no toxicity to it.

Homeopathy works much the same way: You can drink a few drops or a few gallons. It's the same harmony being introduced into your body's living cells, regardless of the quantity. And drinking a few gallons of it will only make you urinate a whole lot, which I suppose the skeptics have been doing a lot these days, staring down into the toilet bowl with their pants unzipped, declaring, "I was right! I can't overdose on it!" Talk about expensive urine, eh?

It's hilarious, in fact, that those who would try to disparage homeopathy would even think that attempting to "overdose" on it proves anything at all. What it really shows is that they utterly lack any understanding of the underlying theories of how homeopathy works -- theories that Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier -- the discovered of the AIDS virus -- now publicly supports, by the way. (http://www.naturalnews.com/031210_L...)

Bent on their own destruction

What really drives the skeptics crazy is that no matter how hard they try, they just can't seem to kill themselves. To be so out of touch with the beautiful, loving and holographic nature of the universe around us is to retreat to a self-loathing worldview that can only be resolved through self destruction. These skeptics just want to kill themselves... and they wouldn't mind taking a few of you along with them, too. Hence their promotion of vaccines, pharmaceuticals, chemotherapy and water fluoridation.

These public demonstrations of chugging what they call "drugs" can only be called psychopathic "public suicide attempts" -- and they can't even get that right, either. (They're drinking the wrong stuff...)

I would suggest they try a few fluid ounces of their own medicines if they want to achieve the overdoses they're looking for. A few ounces of chemotherapy would do the trick nicely. Let me know if one of them tries that, and we'll carry the news: "Skeptic dies after drinking his own medicine. Story at eleven..."

In fact, if these skeptics are looking to kill themselves, they need look no further than the tens of thousands of toxic drugs, vaccines, chemotherapy agents, radiation procedures and barbaric surgical procedures that they claim will heal you! Yep, the stuff they say is good for you is the stuff they won't drink.

And therein lies my challenge...

Why I'm challenging skeptics to drink a gallon of chemotherapy

I am hereby challenging the skeptics to a public drink-a-thon, each drinking the medicines we advocate. I'll meet them in a public place, and we'll each drink the medicines we believe in the most.

I'll bring a gallon of homeopathic remedies and healing raw juices, and the medical fundamentalists and their supporters (the more, the merrier) can each bring a gallon of the liquid forms of chemotherapy, blood pressure medications, coumadin, or statin drugs. We'll chug them in public and see who's left standing. The results get posted on YouTube for the whole world to see. We'll title the video, "SKEPTICS COMMIT MASS SUICIDE BY DRINKING PHARMACEUTICALS AS IF THEY WERE KOOL-AID." Jonestown, anyone?

Do you have any doubt which of us will be left standing? Sure, I may need to pee a whole lot, but the restrooms won't be crowded, because all the skeptics won't be needing them anymore.

That outcome, my friends, would be sad, but newsworthy. More importantly, it would prove an important point: Medicine should be safe for people to consume, not so deadly that you drop dead after consuming it, which is what often happens with pharmaceuticals.

But, alas, my challenge will certainly never be accepted. None of the magicians, skeptics of medical fundamentalists will be publicly chugging chemotherapy any time soon, nor any other large doses of liquid pharmaceuticals. Why? Because they know how toxic those chemicals are.

Do you notice the irony here? The only medicines they're willing to consume in large doses in public are homeopathic remedies! They won't dare consume large quantities of the medicines they all say YOU should be taking! (The pharma drugs.)

And therein rests the truth in all this: Even the skeptics know that homeopathy is inherently safer than their own medicines.

No wonder they keep attacking it: If people found out about safe medicine, where would all of Big Pharma's repeat business come from? After all, the best thing about chemotherapy (from Big Pharma's point of view) is that it creates repeat business from liver damage, kidney damage and brain damage.

All these pharmaceutical poisons are so damaging to the human body -- and brain -- that these is probably one of the main reasons why the skeptics who take all these drugs are incapable of understanding high-vibration advanced medicine. A vaccine shot every year does wonders for lowering the IQ and killing off the creative thinking portions of the brain, after all.

So if you're looking for safe medicine, definitely take a look at homeopathic remedies. They so safe that even the critics can't overdose on them... but you have to admit the attempt makes for great entertainment.

A pattern for Addy

When we were on our mother/daughter trip with friends last summer I bought some Civil War-style fabric. I really wanted to make something for Addy. My friend suggested a certain style, but I didn't have a pattern (need a pattern) like that. A few weeks ago I found what I was looking for. Primrose Lane had just what I was looking for.







I also have other fabric remnants that would work for this dress. Surprise, surprise.

The project is not on a list of "to dos" yet, but someday.

The completed pile

One thing(s) on the list for the week was to sew the pile of cut-out doll clothes.

This one was in progress already, so it was done first. The fabric came from samples the quilt shop owner gave me. It's a vinyl coated cotton. The samples aren't big enough to get all the pieces on one so Amy came up with this arrangement. :)






This dress was next and I'm calling it Simply Summer. It's a little too big, but not noticeable in the pic. I added the rick-rack because it needed something. The rick-rack came from here. I cannot stand the polyester rick-rack that's sold these days, so I did a search for cotton rick-rack. Discovering that it's still made was thrilling!


The pleated skirt and cropped jacket are both Liberty Jane patterns (made before). I had the blouse already. The skirt fabric was stretchy, a fact I didn't know when I bought it. I supposed I should have checked, but I managed to sew it with little issues, other than I had to be careful not to stretch it while sewing.






The last thing I made from the pile was this little dress. Eventually it will have a cropped jacket and capris to go with it.




I also sewed the quilt binding on a quilt I'm working on for a special young lady. Pictures to come. I started working on a doll outfit for my niece who's got a birthday next week. All that, and it's only Wed. I have had a couple evenings to work this week, so that gave me extra time.

I'm still getting better. My ear is beginning to open up. I can hear a little out of it now. I'm still congested on that right side, but not as often. I hope I'm on the mend, but I've thought that before. Prayers are still appreciated.