A winner!

Hi Friends! You know, I just been obsessed with plaids lately, and I had some small strings left over from the Plaid quilt from a few post ago. Well, OK, LOTS left over, including a bunch that my friend Joyce sent from Arizona. So, what else to do except make another plaid quilt? This one is small, with 4 1/2 inch blocks. It was so much fun! Really, anyone who had ever want to try string piecing, should give it a go. It is a blast! This is not the final placement of the blocks, I can see a big error in the placement when I just looked at it.

More string quilts....in the McCall's quilting magazine, back in the summer, in their Scrap Quilting magazine, I found the above quilt by Candace Hassen. I loved it, of course, on sight, and am making it below. I am making it bigger, for our bed, at least queen size. Those strings have been making wild stringy whoopey in the string box, because they are multiplying! Since the strings are multiplying, there are more there than ever, and this is another attempt to use them up.
It is strange, I have this absolutely gorgeous new fabric I got in Florida...yet I gravitate back over to the little scraps and strings! Do you do this too??

This is my progress so far. I plan to make 30 blocks.

Drum roll please! The winner of my giveaway from a couple posts ago was chosen by random number generator, and the winning number is Pat, of http://www.alittleofthisandalittleofpat.blogspot.com/. Congratulations, Pat!! Please let me know your address, and I will send you your gift. Thank you so much to each one of you for entering, and celebrating my anniversary, and visiting my blog. Wish I could send a gift to each one of you!

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Carrie is doing great! No more seizures, gaining weight, doing exceptionally well. So, that means she will be leaving the hospital soon for rehab, as soon as financing can be obtained for her.

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Gary, the gunshot victim is doing well, off the vent and talking up a storm. He was a commercial pilot before the criminals who car-jacked him took his active life away from him. His mom is precious, and cares for him at home.

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Now, I just must tell you about a huge thing that happened last time I worked. I got a 21 year old girl from the ER, and she was in big-time respiratory distress. She had gone to the other hospital in town a couple days prior, and they just sent her home and said she had the flu-no blood work. She came to our ER, we did blood work, and she had 295,000 WBC (white blood cells). Normal is 5-10,000. She was diagonosed with leukemia. Now for the kicker...she is eight months pregnant!!!!!!! This is her 3rd baby, the first she had when she was just 14 years old. She received no prenatal care for this pregnancy. We emergently intubated (put a breathing tube in her), and just could not keep her saturation above 90%, which it needs to be for the baby to get enough oxygen. So, we had 5 doctors in the room, and the decision was to take the baby emergency C-section...STAT!!! Well, this nurse(me) had not a clue, as it has been 20 years since I had helped deliver a baby, and that was in nursing school. I got to go over to the Labor and delivery department, and the surgeons had that baby out in under 5 minutes. Poor little one only weighed 3 pounds and a little bit...the little baby boy was purple when he came out, not breathing and not moving. So, he was also placed on the preemie ventilator. I can report that he was doing much better when I left, I went to see him after my shift. He is pink and wiggling!!

Whewwww!!!

We rushed the mom back to our floor, and the baby went the other way to the neonatal intensive care unit. I worked all day long, one on one with this poor mother, and she was alive when I left. Critically, critically ill. Poor thing, she did not have insurance...if she would have gone to just one prenatal visit, this could have been avoided, probably.

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I will keep up posted about her...

Have a super day all!!

Julie