Monthly Archives: August 2013

Would she give away her green doll?

August 14, 2013crafts, dolls, quotescolors, Waldorf dollsGretchenJoanna

My sewing room is also my prayer room and ironing room, and where I keep a big tub of knitting supplies, and my secret packages before they are wrapped as presents. And my big gym bag for when I swim. Of course it has to accommodate all the piles of fabric I’ve saved, and old clothes that I’m saving to use for the fabric when I make doll clothes or quilts. Ha! I so seldom sew anymore, much of this is largely theoretical.

Sometimes I have the thought that I should give away everything having to do with needle arts and fabric. But that doesn’t feel right, and I keep saving patterns I find online, and pictures of the sort of quilt I would like to make, and tutorials for making Waldorf dolls.

My most recent investment in the sewingly creative side of me was some gorgeous fabric from Weir Crafts. They have all kinds of things one could want for dollmaking, and as soon as I picked out my favorite colors and received my order of cotton velour, I wanted to take its picture. At first I restrained myself, thinking I should actually sew something with the fabric and take a picture of that, but all it took was Frances posting a photo of pretty fabric to weaken my resolve.

In addition to these colors I have some green that I didn’t wash yet. It’s the most delicious stuff to handle, and will make a nice First Doll for Ivy. Ah, but which color shall I start with? I picked out a pattern for the doll, something appropriate for a first-birthday girl, and then in the chapter on “Soft Dolls” I read,

A young child just emerging from babyhood needs gentle colours: white, cream, pink, lilac or pale blue….

A doll made for an older toddler can be sewn from fabric with a colour which appeals to the child’s temperament and general mood….

An outgoing or strong willed child will respond to a red doll because red energises, stimulates and gives confidence.

Blue is relaxing and peaceful; it will be appreciated by a thoughtful boy or girl.

Green is a harmonious colour and can encourage giving and sharing, while pink or lilac is restful and calming.

Yellow often excites and animates children, which is not too good for a quiet bedtime.

My most favoritest colors

Thank the Lord I didn’t read this before ordering my fabric, or I’d still be deliberating over whether I should be choosing for a young or old toddler, or over which moods and behaviors I want to encourage in my grandchild. If I give her a green doll she might give it away, and then I would need to sew her another!

Mostly what I think about is that if Ivy likes the doll she ends up with — and I’m quite content knowing that she may not — it could get dragged around a lot, and I really can’t see sewing it in white or cream, which would soon be just dirty.

Lilac sounds safe, and I plan to use it for this first doll, called Baggy Doll in the book. Baggy Doll has a hat, which I hope to make from some recycled wool sweater material in a different color.

It’s a lot of creative effort I’m putting in just making these plans. There was no place in my super-cluttered sewing room to lay out all the possibilities with enough space for me to think, so I have temporarily taken over two other currently unused bedrooms, one for the doll decisions and materials, and one for the ironing and laundry. Just getting that sewing room in order is a project in itself, which may have to wait. But at least I will be able to uncover the sewing machine.

Susan at Sun Pours Down Like Honey posted a good thought today, oh-so applicable to me and my stuff:

It’s not a group activity. It’s what you do or don’t do, what you do with your days, your time,

to move towards your goals.
Choose hourly, daily. It’s entirely your deal.
Discipline is remembering what you really want.

Wish me luck!

Koulourakia and Colors

August 13, 2013church, food and cooking, other gardenscookies, Japanese anemone, nasturtiums, tomatoesGretchenJoanna

first twist

At church again, this time for baking cookies for that upcoming festival. We made koulourakia, which most of us bakers can’t pronounce, so we call them “the twisty Greek cookies.”

The dough, made with seven pounds of butter, had been prepared last night and stored in the fridge. We scooped it out with melon-ballers and rolled the balls into ropes.

Japanese anemone

And outside I caught this graceful and lovely flower in bud and bloom. I haven’t looked it up yet to find out what it is….though I might have known in the past. Do you recognize it? (update: Jo tells me in the comments it is a Japanese anemone.)

GJ twisting

After being twisted, the cookies get an egg wash and then a sprinkling of sesame seeds. They are basically a butter cookie, and though some recipes include orange juice and/or zest, our current version is “plain.” But I came home with my hands smelling anything but plain.

In our back yard now we have three cherry-sort of tomatoes: Juliet (red); Sun Gold and Sunsugar (orange); and Michael Pollan (pointy green striped). So I can put them all in a salad to colorize it! Not to mention, this year I have three colors of nasturtiums, red, orange and yellow — so I put all those petals in my salad as well. That’s a visual feast as well as a feast for the palate, as last night’s guest said.

In case you can’t see all three tomatoes, here is a close-up:

Today the thermometer reached 75° – woohoo –
so we hope we are in a warming trend.

cool summer doings

August 11, 2013church, grandchildren, my gardenspanakopita, summerGretchenJoanna

The weather is cool, I mean. And this week it’s been cloudy as well, which is nice for taking pictures of flowers. When Kim posted a picture of an unusual coneflower on her blog I was so taken with it, if I were more the sort of person who acts quickly I’d have run over to Lowe’s in hopes of getting one of my own.

But I’m not. My style of impulsiveness sent me out back with my camera to study my own basic purple coneflower.

I began to think how fun it would be to have a collection

of different sorts of coneflowers.

August is full of special feast days in my parish, and we are also getting ready for our big food fair that happens in September. On one overcast day I took a picture of the rose mallow and manzanita at church.

And another day I snapped this one, of a crew of us making 40+ pans of spanakopita to put in the freezer. Those are tins of butter, stacks of filo dough, and a spinach-cheese filling on our table. We will defrost the pastries the weekend of the festival and bake them to sell hot in the Greek booth.

My loving man stopped on the way home from the dentist at a dahlia farm, and brought me this custom collection of big ones. Nice warm colors to make me remember it’s summertime.

And at home my one red zinnia is climbing past three feet tall, twice as high as its neighbor. I bought two plants that were supposed to be the same, but they obviously are not.

I’m glad I haven’t had only the garden variety of pretties this summer. I’ll close this random photo report with one of the sweetest flowers in my life when she was at our house, dear little Ivy.

The sun came out this afternoon, and I expect to see more of it next month, and feel heat. Then I’ll be posting some tomato pictures, too! But I hope I won’t have to wait quite that long.

Honey is what it is, thank God!

August 8, 2013church, nature, quotesbeehives, bees, Feast of Transfiguration, Fr. Ted Bobosh, honey, honey blessing, honeycomb, monasteries, Russia, smells, vineyardsGretchenJoanna

My parish is lucky enough to have our own vineyard right behind the church. This is very handy on the Feast of Transfiguration; at the end of the liturgy we can process out the doors and around the vineyard, to bless the grapes. It’s traditional to bless grapes or apples or any fruit, really, on this day.

Earlier on the feast day morning people brought into the church baskets of fruit and herbs and flowers. I carried a wooden bowl of blueberries and peaches. While we sang and communed and focused on the main event being commemorated, the fruit waited. The incense was particularly sweet that day, and I didn’t notice the smell of the beeswax candles as much as I usually do. Though I could see basil in a couple of the baskets, I didn’t catch its aroma either.

At the end of the service, with the prescribed prayers for the event, Father L. (and all of us) thanked God for all His bounty, and then he sprinkled holy water over the representative sampling.

He explained to us that this is not a superstitious rite we perform, using holy water to do magic on the fruit. When we bless anything in this way we do not make it into something other than what it is, but ask God to reveal it to be what it has always been.

Whatever created things we are talking about, they have always been meant by God to bring us into communion with Him. The service of blessing of fruit brings our thoughts back to Paradise, and the right and good use of the fruits of the earth that God has given us. We are reminded of how in the beginning God made Adam and Eve to be stewards over the Garden of Eden; human beings were called to exercise a loving and thankful dominion over the earth.

But we by our sin have instead caused destruction on the earth. Mankind more often than not has overused, abused and consumed in perverse ways the gifts of the Creator. Personally, I often gobble my food and eat without attentiveness to Him.

We have prayers for the blessing of bees and beehives and honey, too, usually in a separate service. Around here it’s August 1st, but I found pictures of honey blessings in Bulgaria where they do it dramatically on February 10 (see the bright cross picture down the page).

People like to take pictures of little girls and honey, I was happy to discover, and I am posting some of them here. The Russian ones are from Optina Monastery, and the Oregon photos from the Facebook page of New Martyrs of Russia Orthodox Church.

These honey and bee pictures are so enjoyable that I ended up with way more of them than of fruit. I hope you will hop over to the blog of Father Ted Bobosh where he posted a large and glorious photo collection of bees and other pollinators, such as the one I put at the very top, along with quotes about bees and Orthodox prayers for them. Just looking at the pictures will likely make you burst into prayer, too. Here is one of the prayers he posted:

O God, who knows how to work benefits through human labor and irrational living things, You instructed us in your loving-kindness to employ the fruits and works of the bees for our needs. Now humbly we beseech Your majesty: Be pleased to bless the bees and increase them for the profit of the human race, preserving them and making them abundant. Let everyone hoping in Your majesty and Your boundless compassions, and laboring in the care of these living things, be counted worthy to receive abundant fruits of their labors and to be filled with heavenly blessings in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom is due glory, honor and worship unto ages of ages. Amen.

The photo above is from my church on Transfiguration, baskets of all kinds of fruits of the earth waiting for the prayers of blessing. Some of them were inspiring in the variety and arrangement of items, but one of my favorite baskets is the big one in front, full of apples picked just that morning.I don’t eat much honey these days, but I get a whiff of it in the candles every Sunday in church, and I can imagine the heady scent emanating from these tables laden with jars and bowls and plates of honey.

Doesn’t it just tell you something about our God, how sweet He is, and how extravagantly generous, that He would give us something as intense and rich as honey? The bees, of course, are also in the business of pollinating the fruit. The whole Creation and its interconnectedness is reflected in the Church and in our salvation history, all of a piece and orchestrated in love by our dear Father God.