Koert

Your loving comments and emails with sympathies brought tears to my eyes. Thank you all so very much for your warmth and kindness. I definitely felt less alone in my grief these last couple of weeks.

My youngest brother died on Monday May 25 after a battle with Crohn's disease and cancer. He surprised us all these last months with his perseverance and resilience and his doctors called him a miracle. But in the end life became too much of a struggle and his body became too weak and he requested euthanasia which is legal in The Netherlands in certain circumstances. The doctors approved and my brother choose the date and time he wanted to die. For all the people who couldn't be with him it was nice to know the time of his passing so we could all be with him if not physically then at least in spirit. I called my brother one last time on the Sunday before his death. They had just given him his morphine and he had enough energy to talk. We spoke for half an hour and that was very nice. He died on Monday afternoon very quietly and peacefully. The last couple of weeks have been difficult but I know it will get better with time. I haven't done any stitching or sewing since he died but I hope I can show you something in my next post.

I. M.

Koert 1946 - 2009

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Khalil Gibran

Sewing time

Yes, I am still around and still sewing on good days. Here are a couple of things I've been working on lately. I've been wanting to do something with wonky free-pieced letters ever since I read about them on Tonya's blog. A couple of months ago I saw her quilt with the "Love" letters and I loved it and I wanted to do something like it. So I've been practicing. As you can see I have problems getting them wonky; I still have to learn to let go of straight lines LOL.

I've been looking around for an easy pattern I could use to get rid of some of my scraps and I found it in these blocks. The idea for them I found on this blog. It's a great pattern if you want to do some mindless sewing.

The idea for this little wall hanging came from an old book by Gwen Marston and Joe Cunningham. The book is titled: Twenty Little Patchwork Quilts. There are full-sized templates in the book but I used the rotary cutter so I changed the sizes a bit and did not use the templates. The pattern is called Tree everlasting. I basted the quilt and it's ready to be hand quilted now, but I haven't decided on a pattern yet.

And last but not least: a Dear Jane block. I have made only one recently; the Old Windmill F-4. The biggest problems I have with the Dear Jane at the moment is choosing fabric. I spend more time on deliberating what fabric to use than on sewing the actual block LOL.

Jobsite!

This post is all about my frustration with my notebook which came finally back from the repair shop. Feel free to move on if your not interested. I've been without it for more than four weeks and I'm happy to have it back but I have mixed feelings about how it works now and what little it can do. A lot of programs don't work anymore. One problem, it seems, was with the battery: it made the Internet connection unstable. Well, the battery never lasted more than half an hour anyway, so doing without it is fine with me. At the moment I can email and write my blog post but I have to use another computer to upload the pictures. In the shop they took off all the programs and put only about 25% back on, and old versions of those to boot. Very unprofessional I thought, since they always warn you to update to the newest versions. But I guess they wanted to save time by downloading them from a disk rather than from the Internet which takes sometimes forever. I'm still working on getting all the programs up to date. I hope my notebook keeps working till the summer and then I will have to buy a new one. Talk to you all later.

Siggies

Petra, who lives in Germany, send me these two siggies. The first one was drawn by her son Max who is seven years old. Now how cute is that! Thank you Max and Petra.

I have asked Annelies, who manages the address list, to remove my name from the siggy list for a while. With all the stuff that is going on in my life at the moment I have too much trouble to keep up with everything. So please don't send me anymore siggies for now.

Update

Hi everyone, thanks for all your comments and emails. I'm still without my computer: my notebook is at the repair shop and I haven't heard anything from them yet. I am slowly taking over DH's computer adding more and more of my own programs and stuff on his computer. But I miss my own: at least there I know exactly what's on it, where to find it and how to work it. I guess I have to be patient and keep my fingers crossed and hope they can fix the problem.

Not having your own computer does have advantages: I have more time left for my projects. The weather has been relatively cool for April so I have been doing a lot of hand quilting and I have also been working on the Noah's Ark (as you can see in the picture) and I'm working on some other stuff.

My brother is still hanging on but the news has not been good lately. The morphine is helping him to fight the pain but comfortable he is not, of course. It is all very upsetting for him and for us, his loved ones.

Siggies

I found three lovely siggies in the mail one from the USA and two from Germany. Thank you ladies.