In the throes of academia

I have about 2 months to go. Courses will be done by April 15 and two months until I defend my Master's thesis. Then - as I've promised my husband - my academic career will be over. Back to the easy life of full-time employment, full-time motherhood, full-time spouse...part-time everything else.

Since I've been back in school I've been reminded of just how much you can get done in one day if you put your mind to it. My goal is to have this mindset carry over and do a better job of incorporating some of my passions into our everyday life.

My passions: quilting, knitting, reading, photography, scrapbooking, decorating, sewing, gardening...you can see there are plenty of things to incorporate, but my mind set now if live life to the fullest, because there is so much living to do!

In the mean time, I've been keeping inspired. In the last year I discovered pinterest - YIKES is that fun! And a great way to take a break from data analysis for 10 to 20 minutes (realistically at least 30). Then I was introduced to etsy - OMG inspiration you can buy!!! I'm in heaven.

So lately between the blogs I follow and etsy I've purchased some fun quilt patterns, two quilt kits (its so nice to just touch fabric!). Here are some projects just awaiting my retirement from academia...and a cleaner basement in which to work, but that's a whole other post :)

This is the Good Old Hockey Game Quilt - pattern by Kristie at OCD.  The pattern is available on Etsy here.  My little guy - one of the rookies from the Winnipeg 2012-13 Timbit league - will be thrilled.

I'm a sucker for anything Christmas/winter/holidays...I found this cute Winter Wonderland Quilt Kit on Etsy - it can be found here.

Plus a few others...

Recovery Quilt

Mom at the beginning of chemo holding up the "Recovery Quilt"

 

In early January, 2009 we received the news that my Mom had stage 1 breast cancer.  After many hours of crying and weeks of feeling useless I decided I wanted to make my Mom something to comfort her during her recovery. 

I decided on a quilt.  I had several partially started projects and I knew the basics so I set to work.  I knew that if Mom couldn't go out much after surgery, chemo and radiation she'd love to have photos of the family, especially her grandchildren, around.

The centre medallion of the quilt read: "Marlene, Mom, Grandma"

I selected some photos - 24 actually and got to work cropping and printing on fabric, fusible paper.  Then I went to the fabric store and bought fabrics from the breast cancer research fund raiser line.  Within a couple of evenings the quilt was cut and pieced and ready for quilting and binding.  I convinced a local long-arm quilter to put me to the front of the line...with my no-quilting-experience, who knew it usually took weeks or months to get to the front of the queue!  It turned out to be a really large quilt...have to work on that part of the planning.

Close up of one square - my three beautiful nieces.

All in all, I was ecstatic with the end of the project and it was ready for Mom when she came home after surgery.  Mom recovered completely from breast cancer and is healthy.  Thank God for that!

Close up of the borders, these are the breast cancer fabrics.