Count Your Blessings Monday (8/25)

"I am giving us an opportunity every Monday to not only count our blessings, but to share them with others. This is a way that we can encourage one another. Make a post on your blog telling us about your blessing. Please put a link back to this post (on her blog). You can add the URL of your blog post on Mr. Linky below. Many of our blessings we will have pictures of and we can share those as well. I think that many times we forget that it is a blessing to be able to breath, to get out of bed, to hold a baby... Share your blessings with us. They encourage others. We can share so many other things.... special gifts, recipes, let's take the time to share how God has blessed us!! -Marci"

It just keeps going, and going, and going, and going, and.......I have so many blessings to count today that I couldn't pick just one. I thank God for blessing me with my children, the ability to sew, for friends, for family, and the chance to homeschool. So I just wanted to share everything that has been going on here that has been a blessing to us.
First of all, our oldest niece turned 16!!!! I can't believe she is that old already. She is a VERY active teenager (marching band, swim team, show choir, plays violin, etc) Seems like she never stops. So I wanted to make something fun for her birthday. So I went digging through my stash and found some fabric in her school colors and key fob hardware. The little purse is reversible and I also found some fuzzy letters to add her initial and school letters.

Next up are some I Spy bags.....(my children love the books) so I wanted to make these for friends and our oldest two. Hopefully these will keep Big T and Sweet E busy for at least a little while on our trip. I normally would add more beads, but since all the children are young I put fewer in to make it easier to find things. (Oh...I made the purse, keychain, and the bags on Saturday night). I made a list for each bag what was inside and then the children have to find it. We have some larger items all the way down to a coffee bean and a BB.

Then today, while I was waiting for a load of laundry to finish, I decided to put my teacher's manual into page protectors and a 3 ring binder. It was starting to show some where and we are just into our first week. So, I tried out my paper cutter (that I got at Aldi a year ago) and cut the pages down to size to get them into the page protectors. So I went from this.....

to this. Much better!

Then, last night I started making Sweet E's swim dress for our trip this weekend. And yes...I have had this fabric all summer....Stop yelling at me!!!!! Just kidding, but procrastination is the key right now. So after I put my manual into a 3 ring binder and continued to work on laundry I finished up her swim dress. It is actually 2 different patterns and I drafted the skirt. The top ended up smaller than I wanted and the skirt/shorts ended up bigger. Oh well, I might fix it later, but right now...I have a deadline. She seems to really like it. Oh, and don't mind all the serger threads hanging off. I still have to cut those off. :D

Then we had our school lesson and here is a pic of Sweet E finished up her last paper. Practice coloring, cutting, and gluing. While she finished up Big T started peeling the paper off of crayons. Why? Because we made sun crayons (yellow, orange, gold colors) and some other mixed crayons for our trip this weekend. Here is a picture of the crayons all broken and ready to go in the oven. I don't have a picture of them done, but I will try and show them tomorrow.

After making our sun crayons we decided to make edible suns. :D We took chocolate chip cookies (Mama's fav!) and iced them yellow and added orange sun rays. (While I was making the icing I ran out of powdered sugar and I didn't have any in my pantry! So...I wanted to get these done so I pulled marshmallow cream out of the pantry and added it. The icing wasn't as sweet, but it sure was tasty. :D

So, as you can see I had a lot of blessings to be thankful for today and I didn't want to leave any of them out. I pray that all of you are having a wonderful God filled day! Blessings to you.