Really! Another month gone!

Can you believe we're in the last week of February?!  Almost 2 months of 2022 gone already!

Just a short planner/journal update todate.

All ready for this week.  I may have gone overboard with the stickers!

But when you have a week with not much on and therefore little to write about, then it's all about the stickers!

Here's my March calendar.  Hopefully the weather will start getting better and I can get out of the house more.

Thanks for stopping by
Bernice

Canal pieces

As you know I like to make pieces about the canal, using fabric that I printed using the breakdown printing technique.

I finished this piece.

 
I cut up the remaining fabrics and reassembled them into these two rectangles and they were going to be made into rectangular hangings.

 

 

However, I felt that the rectangles were fairly static and that canals do flow.  Not like rivers flow.  Nevertheless the water does move particularly when locks are opened to allow boats to move through.

 

I cut the rectangles into strips the same width as the internal measurement of the bobbins I have stashed away.  This is the top rectangle cut up.

And this is the larger rectangle cut up.

I machine stitched this piece in slightly wavy lines.  I cut off the double layer of calico edges leaving all three layers with raw edges.   The top part.

The lower part

It's quite difficult to photograph.  I used the stairs so that it would undulate.  My plan is for it to be attached to the bobbins so that when the piece is exhibited one raw edge will be towards the wall.  The whole thing

I have stitched the second piece but haven't yet trimmed the edges.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

 

A Day Late

Yesterday was St Valentine's Day.  St Valentine was imprisoned for his faith.  He was beheaded and buried on February 14th 269 AD for helping persecuted Christians and marrying Christian couples.  While in prison he prayed for his jailer's daughter and her blindness was healed.  On the day of his execution, he left her a note signed: Your Valentine.

I rather like this prayer from Pete Greig (although I don't necessarily agree with the 2nd paragraph)

I pray today for those in love, those out of love, and those in between. I remember especially those who find themselves a little bit lonelier than normal.

I do not pray today for loved-up couples, exchanging overpriced flowers and foil-wrapped hearts, leaking pheromones like diesel fumes at candlelit dinners. I’m pretty sure, Lord, they will be OK (for now).  (I think we all need prayer, however 'loved-up' we think we are).

Instead, I hereby dedicate this happy-crappy day to all the brave teenagers who dared to send a card (hoping in vain with every fibre of their being for something back). Let them be a little bit more OK because I prayed.

I think of the mother, coping alone, who quietly bought herself flowers yesterday. Let her kids be kind today. Let her teenagers tidy their bedrooms. And if that's a miracle too far (I realise You've got a lot on in the world right now), could they at least initiate a hug at bedtime. And, Lord, let those daffodils she bought herself last longer and shine brighter than those overpriced red roses that also caught her eye.

Finally, I ask You to look upon the elderly gentleman gazing today at a fading sepia photograph in a silver frame of a wedding in another time. Look at him and look with him and be with him in the remembering and the unremembering too. 

King of Love, on this day named after one of your unmarried saints, embrace the unlovely and the unloving parts of the world and of myself today. 

Song of Songs, inspire surprising turns of phrase and simple thoughtful acts, scatter sparks and rekindle the fires of romance wherever marriages are mired in the mundane. Melt our tiny, tinny expensive chocolate hearts.

And forgive me today, I pray, for this cheap, gaudy, hysterical, isolating thing I have sometimes somehow tried to make of love and of You.

The cynical side of me feels Valentine is the patron saint of card factories and florists.  Despite that, for 40 years Roger and I have exchanged cards and he has bought me flowers.

If you didn't receive flowers yesterday, please share mine.  You are welcome to download this photo.

And if you fall into any of the categories in the prayer above, please know that people all over the world were thinking of you and praying for you yesterday, through the prayer App: Lectio 365.

Thanks for reading to the end.
Bernice