Feeling the Love

As I made my way through my e-mail this morning, I found two lovely surprises. First, someone from Webshots, my photo-hosting site, informed me that one of my quilt pictures was featured as the Members' Choice photo in the Quilts category this week.



This is the featured photo. I have no idea how these "Members Choice" albums or photographs are selected. I have been chosen for Members Choice three or four times now. I think it has something to do with the number of photographs you have stored on Webshots, or perhaps the number of times they are viewed. My most viewed album is my Round Robin album, which shows the growth of each participant's quilt from their center block to the completed top. It has been viewed almost 25,000 times!



Here is the whole quilt. The top was made by my friend and quilt bee member, Marilyn Featham. I loved quilting the baskets in all the pretty spring shades!

Also this morning, my blogging friend Susan Loftin at Sunrise Quilt Studio nominated me for the Life is Grand Award. It is a pleasure to be nominated for these, but I had just about decided not to participate in the passing along of these awards.

I know it is a way to increase readership of your blog. I decided to participate this time because it requires a little personal reflection about life. Like Confession, I believe Reflection is good for the soul!

The rules are that I have to list five reasons why my life is "grand", and then pass it on to five more people.

1. It is all about family. The big, loving family with wonderful parents that I was born into; the small but growing family that Charlie and I have been blessed with; and the extended family that includes all my in-laws and their children and grandchildren. I have a wonderful ready-made group of people who love, support, and share their lives with me.

2. Okay, Charlie was included in #1, but he deserves a separate entry all to himself. We met at N.C. State University in Raleigh when he was a sophomore and I was a freshman, but we did not start dating until the next year. We were married at the end of my junior year. He dropped out and went to work until I graduated, and then he went back. Starting out as poverty-stricken students is not the easiest way to begin a marriage, but we sure had fun with not much money. We have shared life together for almost 38 years now, and I am grateful for having this big strong smart funny handsome man with me on my journey through life.

3. I love the wonder of nature and God's creations. My blog readers know that I get excited about seeing birds and sunsets and flowers and deer and...

4. All my life I have loved to create things, but when I discovered quilting, I embarked on a life-long passionate journey. If I don't get a chance to work with art or my quilts, I get crabby! It is a huge part of my life. It allows me to make nice things for all those folks in #1 (and many others), and a lot of that is because the guy in #2 has cooked a lot of meals over the years.

5. There are so many books and so little time...Life is Grand if I have a good book to dive into! I have been an obsessive reader since I was a little girl reading all the cereal boxes while eating breakfast, and going through all the Bobbsey Twin adventures.

Now to pass this along...if you would like to participate, please consider yourself tagged. It is an interesting exercise to come up with five things that you think make life grand. Take a few minutes and try!