As one year closes ...

... I realise that "hope" became much more resonant this year than I could ever have imagined when I stitched up this wallhanging last spring.

Since my Cutesy Tootsie was born in the summer I have had to learn to hope more than ever before.  She arrived in our lives unexpectedly with Down Syndrome, unable to feed, coping with two holes in her heart and unable to see because of congenital cataracts in both of her beautiful twinkly wee eyes, to name only a few of her medical issues.  Yes, 2015 has been the year that has broken my heart, the year when I have had to learn to sing hope's tune for my daughter even when the words evade me.

As a Christian family, our hope is founded in God, his goodness and his healing power and much of my hope is through prayer.  It has not been easy to hold on to hope every day, if I said it was I'd be lying, but I have amazing Christian friends who have upheld my hopes in prayer faithfully and lovingly even on the days when I couldn't.  For their prayers and for God's answers I am so very, very grateful.  So, am I telling you that everything is sorted out with Cutesy's health?  No, I'm not.  But we have now got a little girl who looks so much healthier and is so much stronger than the picture of her above just after her birth.

Cutesy Tootsie changes our world every day when her face brightens with smiles as wide as you could imagine.  Try as I might, I cannot catch them on camera.  She is too quick and too curious about the camera and the smiles go just as I click the button!  In her short time with us Cutesy has had two operations to remove the lenses from both her eyes and she now wears contact lenses but there remain concerns about the development of her vision. So I have to hold on to hope that God will hear our prayers and allow her to see further and further fields of focus each day.  She will also still need heart surgery this spring to close those holes but she has amazed her doctors by not needing to be hospitalised every few weeks as might be expected with her heart condition. So again, I am thankful and I hold on to hope and keep on singing that tune because 2016 may well be as testing as this year has been.

In the midst of all of this, stitching and social media have taken much more of a back seat that I would have liked but sometimes life dictates the priorities for a while.  I did manage to get a free sewing day earlier in December to make sure that Tootsie got a Christmas Stocking and a gift sack.  Couldn't have Santa struggling for where to leave pressies, could we?  I love those Scandi fabrics and it felt REALLY lovely to be stitching something again on the machine.

Of course, I would love 2016 to be a year of much more sewing than of late, but really it's not the hottest issue just now.  So, instead of rashly declaring that 2016 will be the year of clearing up my WIPs and UFOs, I am simply going to choose to stitch as takes my fancy this year.

So, if I settle down to baste and quilt this lovely

(possibly for Cutesy Tootsie's bedroom wall)

or make up all the remaining 6" blocks for this 

(think there are 30 of them to go)

or crochet all the hundreds of remaining hexagons for this throw

(I'm thinking not so likely, but maybe it will at least expand a little)

then that's grand.  

BUT if I just want to do something different then I'm ok with that too this year.  I want it to be a year of trying things out, fitting in a little bit of stitching around our crazy new "normal" weekly schedule of baby needs, work, family meals, laundry, hospital appointments and teenage taxiing.

So, I foresee I year of more starts than finishes and I am really looking forward to this one in particular! 

I will share my plans for these 30s style fabrics when I have made a wee start.

I hope to be a little more present on this blog space, and on Instagram too, because I miss it and the connection it provides to all of you lovely stitchy folks out there.  So, I hope you'll bear with me and pop in from time to time to see if I've managed to stitch something to share.

Now though I've gone on much longer than I intended so it's time to wish you all a very happy and hopeful New Year.  Have a good one!