Friday | Late August Gifts

Hello to the last Friday in August. We’ve nearly made it through this month, friends. Can you believe it? September – here I come. Apple picking, apple pies, foliage, drives through the mountains, hot chocolate, and cozy time under my quilts? Yes, please! AND this week has been full of surprises and gifts. I’m sharing three of them with you today.

Does this gorgeous yarn look familiar to any of you? Sarah recently spun this up and decided to put it up for sale. I commented on her blog and said that I was interested in buying it but needed to wait a little while because I was busy ordering books for school and wasn’t sure how our finances would shake out this month. She kindly said that she would put it aside for me and then – it just showed up in my mailbox this week. What a gift! Thank you again, Sarah. I cannot wait to start my next pair of socks with it. The colors are rich and gorgeous and I wish I could create such beautiful yarn. That’s unlikely, so I’m going to continue enjoying Sarah’s whenever I can! And I’m floored by her generosity.

Remember the Bloom quilt I was working on this winter? It fell to the wayside in March when I was “pruning my branches.” With only two bocks left!! (those two on the bottom right) This week my husband gave me a wonderful gift of time in the basement and I cranked those babies out and finished up this top. Now it’s in the bin with the rest of the finished quilt tops, waiting to be quilted. I’ll worry about how that’s getting done another day. And kittens cannot resist quilts when they’re laid out – it’s a fact of life. Hello to Agnes sniffing around!

The third gift this week was student loan relief. I know there’s a lot of controversy around this announcement and I would say that no one knows all of the details of other people’s financial situation, despite how easy it can be to judge. Thanks to some bad financial advice I was given as a 17 year old filling out financial aid forms, I’ve been making student loan payments since 2006. You might also know that I’ve been a stay at home mom (for many reasons) for about three years and those loan payments have been very difficult due to our tighter budget. I won’t even go into how difficult it was to pay those loans even when I was working. I’ve been following this issue closely since Biden’s election because it was something he ran on. I was so happy that there was action this week and that I qualify for forgiveness thanks to the Pell Grants I received and our income.

---

Thank you all for being here through the ups and downs of the last few months (years?) – it means a lot to have found this little corner of the internet. I plan to be back on Monday with an update on my One Little Word. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, full of exactly what you need. Take good care!