After the difficult year I had, everything came together just in time for our long planned trip to New Zealand in December. For months, we thought we might have to cancel, and I did not truly believe we would go until the last week of November, when my lab results came back fairly normal. Sometimes miracles do happen, and we were able to spend the entire month in New Zealand.

My husband is the best tour organizer you can imagine, and he had everything planned out beautifully. We spent the first half of our trip on the North Island, then flew to Christchurch on the South Island, and even made it to Stewart Island for a couple of days.

It was a fantastic trip and a much needed break. We were lucky enough to see penguins in the wild and even spotted kiwis on Stewart Island, which was a wonderful experience. I will leave you today with a gallery of my favourite pictures.

Just a quick heads up that today is the final day my pattern store will be open. I will deactivate it tomorrow morning and process any remaining orders before it closes.

I hope to reopen next year, although nothing has been decided yet. It will depend on how things go with my health. I am working on new patterns, and I am hopeful that everything will come together.

Pumpkin Patch Pattern Store

As several of you have noticed and pointed out, I deactivated my online store in September. I wasn’t in any shape to turn on the computer and send out patterns, and since I wasn’t posting any BOM blocks either that seemed like the best solution. My plan was to close the store at the end of the year without ever reactivating it but I now realize that this won’t work. People missed the free downloads for various reasons and want to purchase the missing patterns. I have reactivated the store for now but please note that it will only be online until the end of this month. I will not be able to fill orders in December. If I will reactivate it next year depends on how I am feeling. So if you are missing any blocks or would like to buy any other pattern, please do so until the end of November.

Pumpkin Patch Pattern Store

I know many of you are eagerly awaiting the next Safari block, but unfortunately, I must ask for a bit more patience. If I could, I would be happily posting here, making quilts, sketching designs, and writing new patterns. But life has a way of interfering, and this time it has done so in a big way.

For the past eight weeks, I have been unable to do much, creatively or otherwise. I still cannot sit or stand for extended periods, nor walk comfortably. On top of that, a new medication is causing significant nausea. Finding the right treatment is a frustrating process of trial and error — everyone responds differently, and it is hard to predict what will work best. So I have no choice but to be patient, and I can only ask the same of you.

These past weeks have given me a lot of time to think, and I have made the difficult decision to close my longarm quilting business. It is time to use the energy I have more wisely. I have not yet made a final decision about my patterns. We will finish the Safari Block of the Month, but on a revised timeline. At this point, even I do not know exactly what that will look like, so I hope you will bear with me as I figure it out.

At the beginning of the year, I was open about my ongoing health challenges, and I did note that there might be times when I would need to step away without much warning.

With that in mind, I kindly ask that you do not contact me to ask about the BOM. The contact form has been disabled, comments on this post are closed, and emails will not receive a reply. Please know that I am doing my best to recover, and I truly appreciate your patience and understanding.