Draper Temple

After moving to a new (for us) house in December, we were lucky enough to have moved from a stake in the Jordan River Temple District to a stake in the new Draper Temple District. This is particularly remarkable because our old stake borders our new stake. Yesterday, Joseph and I were able to be ushers in the open house for the Draper temple and it was a pretty amazing experience.

I was an usher in the Celestial Room and Joseph was an usher about 20 feet outside the door I was standing near. What a wonderful experience to stand in the Celestial Room for 3 hours! One of the many highlights of the day (and probably the best highlight!) was that Elder M. Russell Ballard came through the temple giving a tour to Martin Luther King III. When they came near to the Celestial Room, we waited for all the other guests to leave and held up the line behind them and they came into the room with their security personnel and then the doors were shut. It was just me, the other usher, and these two great men with their security in this amazing room for as long as they wanted to sit and enjoy it. How marvelous to be given that chance!

Then, at the end of our shift, we hurried home to drop Joseph off and then I went back and was able to play the piano for an hour for the guests at the stake center adjacent to the temple while they ate cookies, drank water, and looked at the beautiful pictures on display before loading the buses back to where they started. Another amazing opportunity! I am so glad that I was selected and able to do this wonderful service.

Hanks Family Pictures 2008

Here are the results of our family pictures from this year. Family pictures are always so stressful for me and so I have been dreading them for months but they turned out just fine.

Project of the year

First of all, if you keep up on my mom's blog or my sister's blog (Debby's), many of my blog entries will seem like old news. This will be one of those entries. But for those of you who don't read theirs - enjoy!

About a year ago, when my Grandma Orris came to visit, we went shopping at quilt stores and found a very cute kit to make advent calendars. My grandma bought enough for our whole family (5) and my mom and I set out to make them. Most of the work was done in our own little sweatshop last summer when Joseph was in Costa Rica for a week and a half. We had to trace each applique piece 5 times (since we were making five of these), cut out each traced piece, iron each piece to the fabric, cut each piece out again, iron each piece on again, stitch around the edges, press the edges of the pocket under, sew the pocket to its background, and then sew each of the backgrounds together. Then it was quilted and finished. Phew!!! It was an incredible undertaking and extremely rewarding. I must say, they are beautiful and a fun quilt made from the contributions of three generations of quilters. I am pretty proud of this accomplishment. They are our Christmas gifts to the family this year but we gave them to everyone on Thanksgiving so that they can enjoy them this season.


I have very fond memories of the advent calendar we had growing up that my Aunt Elna made for us and hope that my children will have many fond memories of this one in the years to come.

We're expecting...

A GIRL!!!!! Can you believe it?! After having two boys, I wasn't sure we would ever have a girl - but we are! We are going to name her Elizabeth. I am due April 10 and am feeling much better these days. Here is one of the pictures from the ultrasound we had yesterday:

Grrr...

Although I have many, MANY more interesting and important things to document here, all I can bring myself to write about right now is my quilting woes.

Being a perfectionist has its down sides, and I have been working on overcoming this weakness in me for several years now. One place where perfectionism is a particular problem is in quilting. Let's face it: quilts are NEVER perfect, even when they look pretty darn close. I have decided that I love quilting enough that I am willing to overlook a certain amount of error in order to be able to enjoy the process and the product. However, the quilt that I am currently working on (see the entry below, a little way down the page) is having enough problems that it is just about outside the reaches of the acceptable margin of error. I do not think it is fixable at this point, at least fixable at a level that I can still have some pride in my work, but I can't bring myself to abandon it either. So I keep (slowly) plugging away... sluggish because I know I'm not going to be happy with it anyway.

My mom, a master quilter, keeps telling me it's fine and that it will never be perfect, but I'm not really convinced on this one.

I am sure that when I am finished, many will say it is wonderful, and beautiful, and blah, blah, blah, but they will either be kindly overlooking the major skee-womp-ish-ness of the final product or will not be looking very closely. I will then have to smile and say thank you graciously while I sigh deeply inside, because no one likes it when you devalue their compliment with all kinds of, "Actually, it's horrible and I didn't want to finish it, but thanks anyway..."

Hmmm... I guess this one I'll have to keep struggling with internally for awhile. Maybe re-reading this post will help me see the foolishness in my ways. Or maybe not.

Priscilla Ahn

This is beautiful. I am not up on pop culture much at all but this is just wonderful...

Priscilla Ahn

Quilting

One thing some people may not know about me is that I LOVE quilting. Unfortunately, time and means have limited my quilting for the last few years. To make up for it, I have helped many other people work on their quilts, and many of these quilts have been successfully completed. I have taken a small amount of pride in their lovely work, but that is not the same thing as having a beautiful quilt finished yourself. Now that my thesis is completed and the diploma in hand, I have really wanted to start again but my love of expensive fabric has still been a limiting factor.

However, my desire to quilt has finally exceeded a reasonable level and this has forced me to overcome a fear that I have had. That fear is a fear of making scrap quilts. For those of you who don't know, a scrap quilt can be made with any pattern, but instead of going out and purchasing coordinating fabric, you use fabric left over from other projects and can make them as coordinating or not, as you please. I have a great fear of this, largely because I am never really confident in the coordination of such random fabric and am worried that I will go through all of the work of completing a quilt and not even like how it turns out due to the fabric selection.

As I said, my desire to quilt has forced me to overcome this fear and my mother has shared her library of scrap fabrics in order that I might once again enter the world of quilting.

So here are the fabrics that I have chosen:


And here is the pattern that I am using (it is a quilt my mom made recently):


When it is all done, I will post a picture of it for all to see. And then you can be a judge of how you feel about scrap quilts...