On June 25th of this year, I had some worries on my shoulder. The biggest one was that I had to lead the Vacation Bible School volunteer workship the next day, my least favorite task as a VBS co-director. This workshop means I have to make a speech, have dozens of sets of paper work ready (150 copies each), have all my leaders in place, and more or less know what I’m doing for VBS starting on July 11th. However, June 25th was also our St. Louis Church 133rd annual community picnic! It’s our main fund raiser for the church each year, requiring 1000 volunteers. Communities from all over Howard County, MD come, and it’s a very fun event. Never mind that I was leading this scary workshop the next day, I had volunteered to face paint for a couple hours AND babysit my one and only niece for the afternoon and evening. How could I deny myself that fun? So I put aside my stress (more or less) and set out to have a fun day.
I arrived at the picnic at 11am, which gave me 1 hour to run around before face painting. I bought a cake at the bake sale. I bought the take-out dinner tickets which my husband would pick up later. I looked through the white elephant sale. I passed on the $20,000 raffle. But I had to pause at the QUILT raffle. Oh wow…….
To understand how amazing this quilt looked to me, you have to know that I LOVE rainbow colors. Given a choice, these are the typical things I knit for ME:
So when I saw this quilt, I thought, “This is my quilt!” I quickly bought 5 tickets, and ran on to look for paper plates that might fit on top of a bucket for our craft project…..I couldn’t completely get VBS off my mind.
After 1 hour of dashing around doing these things, I face painted for 2 hours. Then my neice, Anna, and my daughter, Bethany, were dropped off by my patient husband who never berates me for planning too much in one day. The 2 girls and I had happy picnic fun for the next several hours…..cotton candy, simple rides, hot dogs, silly games, etc. Anna’s favorite was the duck-in-th-pond game.
At 5:30 we went home, ate our take-home dinner, and the girls watched a movie. At 7:30 I took Anna home (she lives in front of me, yay!) and we did the bed time routine. In the middle of a story, I heard the cell phone ring. Didn’t get there in time. Then at 8:15, when my brother and sister-in-law came home, Bethany also arrived with big news: I WON THE QUILT!!! Someone had called my cell, then called my house and Bethany answered….whereupon she was informed that out of hundreds (thousands?) of tickets, they had drawn my name!!!! Wowsers!!!
The next day, the day of my VBS workshop, they announced the raffle winners at all the masses, so I got lots of hugs. Can you imagine how wonderful that felt as I was about to face my fears related to speach, paper work, set up, and complicated dispersement of over 100 teens and adults?
The next day my mom congratulated me too, and she promised to make curtains for the room, for surely no ordinary window treatment was going to work with this quilt. My husband even agreed to put it on our bed, which was another gift to me. I mean it’s bright!! Really bright. Not every husband would agree to that.
So thank you Jesus and the quilt club for that wonderful gift to me on June 25th. The timing was sweet, and the work of art will be with me forever. YAY, COLOR!!
Osborn Fiber Studio 