Winter Machine Embroidery Freebies

Just in case you may have missed it, Embroidery Library is offering some great winter freebies up through January 22, 2012. Two of the designs available need bigger hoops as one has a measurement of over 8" on one side and the other has one over 9" on one side and is designed for an endless hoop, but for those with smaller sew out ability they have split the design for you. Embroidery Library, if you have told them your preferred format and maximum size of your hoops, will remind you if designs are too big for your machine when they are placed in your shopping cart. I download all the sizes anyhow, as maybe someday, some nice person will give me a machine that can use those large designs. LOL! Downloading all the smaller sizes helps you from having to decrease or increase the sizes of your designs as much to get them to fit a certain area and that keeps your stitch count and sew out looking better. I just love the generosity of this company! And what terrific designs besides.

Gifts!

Last year (2011) was a rough one physically for me with a lot of pain and periods of discouragement. Then I found a devotional book at our local library book sale on seeing the gifts that God gives or brings our way. I read through that book twice during the year before passing it on to someone else that might find use for it. Over the month of December, which was a financial strain for us, I thought again about that book and my need to acknowledge the gifts that come my way. I wanted to focus on the good and not the bad that was happening in my life. Suddenly life just didn't feel as full of strain and problems when thinking about the good that was happening.

When Ron and Savannah came for Christmas he brought me 3 Sew Beautiful magazines that someone had given him to pass on to me. I hadn't seen them before as I don't have a subscription to this magazine as so many of the projects are for little girls that I don't have much opportunity to sew too much for. I was very excited to get these magazines and reading them helped to take my mind off the pain I'm in. Best of all I saw some neat ideas that I can hardly wait to try on the Little Dresses for Africa dresses that I make.  In one of the issues they even had a 'pillowcase' dress.

My next sewing 'gift' came in the mail today. A friend from one of my sewing digests wrote me and offered to send me 6 memory cards and a hoop to go with my second hand Janome 9000 or she was going to throw them out! I was so grateful for her generosity and she even refused to let me pay for the shipping!

Several weeks ago I had an author write me and ask me to read and review her book which I of course said yes to. Although I've been having a hard time reading this past week, this has been a fun and interesting book to read and I will be doing a review of it soon. And then today I received my second book gift. Michael Palmer sent me an Advanced Reading Copy of his book Oath of Office to read and review. Since he is one of my favorite authors, this will be a treat indeed!

I challenge you to keep track of the gifts that come your way so that on discouraging days you can think of the many blessings that have come your way. God indeed is good!

Purple Hat New Freebies

The Purple Hat has just posted three more freebies that is part of their animal alpha-bet series. These designs would be great as quilt blocks. Purple Hat features lots of children's designs and in the hoop designs. Visit them here and see what they are working on!