Yarn-along: March 23rd and the swatches are almost done ...

~ Two of my favorite things are knitting and reading, and the evidence of this often shows up in my photographs. I love seeing what other people are knitting and reading as well. So, what are you knitting or crocheting right now? What are you reading? Take a single photo and share it either on your blog or on Flickr. Leave a link below to share your photo with the rest of us! ~ Ginny, Small Things

---

Unfortunately, last week was a tough week for any kind of knitting as my laptop was dying a slow death and I was in the "denial" stage most of the week, trying to get the blasted thing to limp through its work.  Well, it made it till Thursday a.m. and I quickly hopped on dh's and ordered a new Toshiba (and a wireless printer while I was at it) -- thank goodness for overnight from Amazon and for design sales!

Well, this week is starting out much better! I've been knitting and reading and generally doing the good.

On the needles:  swatches for my talk at the Dog House Yarns Retreat (will we see you out at Graves Mountain on April 9th?).  The morning session will discuss how to substitute yarns for designs so I collected up different yarns, all in worsted weight, and am doing 50st by 72row squares(on size 8s) to show the differences in gauge, feel (or "hand"), drape and other characteristics.  I'm finishing up on the midnight blue wool/silk blend and then I have one or two to go and then I'll be ready to move on to real knitting again.

FYI, the yarns shown (clockwise, starting at the lower left) are:

• Plymouth Yarn's Boku (95% wool, 5% silk) in color 8 (very autumnal stripes)
• Universal Yarn's Poems Silk (75% wool, 25% silk) in color 803 "Baffinis" (greys and blues)
• Plymouth Yarn's Jelly Beenz (75% acrylic, 25% wool) in color 9623 (rosy pink with dashes of brights -- perfect for a little girl's sweater)
• Cascade Yarns' Venezia Worsted (70% merino, 30% silk) in color Forest (a gorgeous dark green)
• Plymouth Yarn's Royal Llama Silk (60% fine lama, 40% silk) in color 1842 (midnight blue)
• Stonehedge Fiber Mill's Shepherd's Wool (100% wool) in Antique Rose (a pale, but warm, pink)

On the reading table:
Our current read-aloud is the sequel to the wonderfully fun-to-read-aloud, A Whole Nother Story.  We just started Another Whole Nother Story yesterday, and it promises to be just as much fun as the first.

I just finished reading the fascinating, based-on-fact, novel, The Daughter's Walk by Jane Kirkpatrick.  I have now turned my reading toward that pile of books you see in the upper right corner of the picture:  lots of books on decorating on a shoestring!  Spring always gets my interior design creative juices flowing and these books have gorgeous ideas:  Flea Market Style, Simple to Sew Slipcovers and Cover-ups (especially for the leather furniture -- we stick to it in the summer!), Country Living's Cottage Style, Better Homes and Garden's New Cottage Style, HGTV's Design on a Dime, and Country Living's Shoestring Chic.  If those don't keep me busy this week, I've also got a few Windows 7 books to help me deal with all the changes to un-broke Windows programs that Microsoft decides we all need!

Go check out Ginny's post for today and add your own knitting/reading activities for this week!

 

Feast Day: Our Lady of Lourdes

Our family is very tied-into the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes:  my husband and I met while we were teaching at Our Lady of Lourdes School .... we were married at Our Lady of Lourdes Church ... two of our children were baptized at Our Lady of Lourdes Church ... we've been very blessed to go to Lourdes as a family, twice -- once in 2000 and again in 2001.  My maternal great-grandfather came from the Basque village of  Oloron-Ste.Marie, about 20 miles west of Lourdes in the Pyrennes.

We have many connections.

This apparition of Our Lady to St. Bernadette in a grotto in the south of France 18 times in the 1850s is one of the most visited shrines in the world.  Catholics, Christians, Jews ... even pagans go to Lourdes to pray and become whole in mind, body and spirit.  Some are cured ... some are eased in their illness ... some are left with the crippling diseases which have brought them to this spot.  But all leave with a sense of peace and love and care that only the Blessed Mother and her Son can bring.

It is an amazing place like none other on earth ... a place of prayer ... a place of peace ... a place of love.  The candlelight prayer service everynight is amazing: singing and crying and praying in different languages, warmed by the glow of the thousands and thousands of candles that fill the area in front of the Cathedral.  There is a constant flow of penitents into and out of the Confessional Building, where the Sacrament of Reconciliation is offered all day every day in just about every language.  The Blessed Sacrament is available for adoration as is Holy Mass throughout the day.  The sick ... wheeled in on stretchers or wheel chairs, some even carried ... are all there for a special healing service in the afternoon, every afternoon. 

What a haven of peace and Divine love in the midst of our 21st Century.

Today, we'll read stories from The Wonders of Lourdes: 150 Miraculous Stories of the Power of Prayer ... we'll watch Bernadette and Song of Bernadette (we started last night by watching Loretta Young in Road to Lourdes).  We'll eat Tuna Lorenzo (tuna salad on homemade English muffins, broiled) and Gateau Basque (I'll post our version later) ... and of course, we'll pray for all those who are sick, suffering or dying as well as praying in thanksgiving for God's Love which allowed St. Bernadette to see Mary and God's Charity which continues the miraculous cures into the 21st century.

 

Unit Study: Explorers and Exploring

I have been quite remiss in mentioning the unit on which we've been working. 

About six weeks ago, we were browsing a book store and I came across this awesome book:  How to be an Explorer: An Adventurer's Guide .  This is one of those really fun books that has pop-ups and letters and diary-entries and games all rolled into a book that is meant to be "an adventurer's guide" written by "Sir Henry Hardcastle" to teach kids how to explore.  "Written" in 1931, the book is a guide to explorations of the Thirties -- archaeological digs, Polar treks, jungle safaris and animal discoveries. 

My kids were so enthralled with this book ... I decided to do an explorer's unit with them.  A great way to tie together history, geography, map-reading, orienteering, nature study, survival skills and just plain fun all into one. 

So off we started ...

The how-to book breaks exploring into perfect unit sections:

1. tool kit -- which we'll make after Christmas using the wonderful haversack directions given in Alice Cantrell's Tin Cups and Tinder: A Catholic Boy's Little Book of Fire, Food and Fun.  We'll fill each haversack with binoculars (they'll each get a pair for Christmas ... shhh!), journal, sewing kit (also made from Cantrell's book), first aid kit, magnifying lens and other critical items (incl snacks of course!).
2. ideas for exploring and training -- we'll be armchair training by reading about explorers as well as watching great videos like:  Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Around the World in 80 Days, as well as watching the documentaries that Michael Palin has done:  Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, the New Europe, and others (for Netflix subcribers, the Palin vids are on instant queue!).  We're also reading Voyage of the Dawn Treader (getting ready for the release of the film in Dec) making maps of the islands as we go from C.S. Lewis' amazing descriptions!  This is what we've been studying for the last month or so ... reading and watching videos!
3. individual areas of exploring (we'll take about a two weeks on each of these):
1. sailing the seven seas -- KonTiki
2. beneath the sea (a great op for reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea )
3. jungle and rainforest
4. lost civilizations and archaeology (we've started on this a bit in history while reading All Ye Lands)
5. polar quest -- antarctic and artic (we'll watch the first and last segments of Palin's Pole to Pole again, watch Shackleton, and re-read Mr. Popper's Penguins )
6. desert adventures -- Lawrence of Arabia
7. mountains -- Heidi
8. finish with an overview of some famous explorers -- Lewis & Clark, Magellan, Captain Cook, and others

This breaks into such a wonderful long-term lesson plan for us.  We'll take a break for our Advent study (on Dickens and Victorian Christmas -- that will be the next post!) and be able to pick up right after the first of the year with exploring this amazing world God gave us!   As the weather improves in the Spring and Summer, we'll be explorers in our own part of the world .... adventuring into the mountains, down into the caverns (a field trip to Luray in April), out west in the Summer for a niece's wedding (a rode trip that is thru some amazing parts of God's ocuntry!),  and other wonderful areas around and about the Old Dominion.

Come along for the journey ... ok?
 

Month of Thanks Day 4: Thanks be to God for my Knitting

Sorry this is about 9 hours late... 

for day four I am very thankful for my knitting ... my companion in the evenings when the rest of the house is settled for the night ... my stab at being creative and imitating the Divine Creator himself ... my chance to make a bit of "egg and butter" money for the family ...

Thank you, God, for this talent!

We love our UPS man ...

... and today was a real haul ...

• a gift for the birthday man ... not sure what that is ...
• BamBam, after much scouring of Amazon to find just the right use of money from N&P, finally decided on Wed that what he absolutely must have was Mr. Potato Head's Silly Suitcase.  He got up at 6:00 a.m. to do this:
So he could do this as soon as Mr. UPS arrived ...
• and I finally ordered the book that I got for my birthday (thanks to N&P and Kotch! as well as some well-earned Amazon credits):  The Worldwide History of Dress ... a mammoth 600+ pages, packed with ethnic costumes from all over the world!  These are the kind of garments I like to replicate with my knitting ... so this book is VERY VALUABLE to me and mine.

 

Don't you just love the UPS man?

WooHoo .... In His Image gets approval ...

The Catholic Writer's Guild, a very cool group of writers, publishers and illustrators, has awarded my book, In His Image: Nurturing Creativity in the Heart of Your Home it's Seal of Approval. 

The CWG website elucidates what this means:

The CWG Seal of Approval is a kind of “gatekeeping” device for Catholic bookstore owners and readers. Simply put, it’s an endorsement that the book supports Catholic beliefs and values. We began the SoA after discussions with Catholic bookstore owners who said they often did not have time to fully evaluate books—and often didn’t stock books that came from unknown writers or smaller presses.

The SoA is not a critique of a work, but rather an assurance of its Catholicity--that neither the work nor its author go against the Mageristerial authority of the Catholic Church. In other words, we evaluate for faithfulness, not for writing style or quality.

The CWG is a great group of Catholic creative folks whose expertise and knowledge I very much respect.  If you're a writer (fiction, non-fiction, poetry), an artist or illustrator, or an editor or publisher and you are NOT a member yet, what's stopping you?  Go check out their website and join in the fun! 

And if you've haven't yet gotten a copy of my book, In His Image, please do -- it's gotten very good comments from those readers who have been gracious enough to share their thoughts with me ....