50!😲

Hi friends! Yes, that is right! I turned 50 years old yesterday! My mom is having us all over on Sunday for a birthday party. I will share a picture of my cake with you next time. Brian has ordered a special cake.😁 It will be pink with a poodle on top! No, I am not kidding you!

I have not had much opportunity to stitch this week. I did want to share the winner of 'Secret Flower Bed' by The Trilogy pattern.

I had thirteen ladies enter the giveaway. The winner is: our friend Vicki

The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner was a very good book. I really did not realize German Americans were sent to internment camps, did you? Even Italians. And then forced to be sent back to Germany and Italy. I knew about the Japanese Americans. What a sad part of our history.
Elise Sontag is a typical Iowa fourteen-year-old in 1943—aware of the war but distanced from its reach. Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer. The family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where, behind the armed guards and barbed wire, Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity. The only thing that makes the camp bearable is meeting fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, whose friendship empowers Elise to believe the life she knew before the war will again be hers. Together in the desert wilderness, Elise and Mariko hold tight the dream of being young American women with a future beyond the fences. But when the Sontag family is exchanged for American prisoners behind enemy lines in Germany, Elise will face head-on the person the war desires to make of her. In that devastating crucible she must discover if she has the will to rise above prejudice and hatred and re-claim her own destiny, or disappear into the image others have cast upon her. The Last Year of the War tells a little-known story of World War II with great resonance for our own times and challenges the very notion of who we are when who we’ve always been is called into question.

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened."  Matthew 7:7-8

I hope you have a good weekend my friends! Thank you for stopping by!

Stitching and praying,
Vickie