WWJD?

Our city has a very nice community garden where we acquired a 10x10 plot, perfect for the family who has not grown a salad in a long time.  The kids have never had a chance to plant a seed and patiently watch for it to come up, water and weed, and finally eat the fruit of their hard labor.  We have a lovely row of lettuce, one of carrots, and one of beans.  There is a hill of bush cukes with empty space next to it for a tomato.  This won't produce enough to put up a harvest, but it will be fun to eat our own home-grown salads.  

Elisabeth is my would-be nature lover, and she REALLY wanted her own little plot. The community garden is filled up, so she went in search of a good piece of ground in the vicinity of our townhome. I was away one morning last week, and when I came home, voila! She had planted a little garden in the empty lot a block away!  She had a wonderful sense of accomplishment.  Her story is here.

Betz's garden is not visible from the road, but there is sort of a path that goes by it... and I was a little bit concerned that some vandals would find it and destroy it. They left it alone just until the baby cucumbers began to peek out of the soil, and then blam!  This evening we discovered teenage boy-size boots have clomped and kicked through the dirt, doing their best to destroy the well-beloved little garden.  :(  Don't you just wonder why some people get a kick out of destroying the nice things that other people do??  There was a bit of tearful mourning.  

Nothing like this has ever happened to my kids before, and this is a real-life test of our Christianity! The Millers or the Moodys would have made cookies for the naughty fellows and returned kindness for meanness, but we don't know who the culprits are.  What would Jesus do? And if he humanly couldn't do anything, how would he feel and react? Would he want to go knock those boys' blocks off, or would he just say, "Oh well"?  Would he plant the garden again or leave it a mess?  More important, what would be the condition of his heart?  Would this little episode serve to draw him closer to his Father? Would he be able to forgive the vandals and let this disappointment make him stronger?

It's easy to talk about turning the other cheek and all that good Beatitudes stuff, but living it is a different story.  That is a challenge for the new man.  :)

But I say unto you which hear,

Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,

Bless them that curse you,

and pray for them which despitefully use you.

[...]

And as ye would that men should do to you,

do ye also to them likewise.

For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye?

for sinners also love those that love them.

 And if ye do good to them which do good to you,

what thank have ye?

for sinners also do even the same.

And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive,

what thank have ye?

for sinners also lend to sinners,

to receive as much again.

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend,

hoping for nothing again;

and your reward shall be great,

and ye shall be the children of the Highest:

for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.

Luke 6:27-35

Transfer a Pattern and Keep the Larger Sizes

Lots of sewing has been going on here lately, and this is one area where I do know what I am doing. Most of the time. Enough that I could be a help to someone who doesn't know what they are doing. I have a few tips to share with beginning seamstresses, and there is a slight possibility of me starting a sewing blog... but not tonight! 

We grown ladies don't want to ever need the larger sizes when we are sewing for ourselves, but if you are sewing for a child, you probably want to be able to reuse your pattern when the child has grown. A jacket for Betz is in the works, and she is a size 14 girls. This pattern goes up to size 16, and I don't want to just cut those size 16 lines off and throw them away. If this dress and jacket combo turns out nicely, I might want to make it again sometime. This tutorial is on how to cut the smaller size of a pattern out without losing the larger sizes. 

When you are cutting out a straight seam, just fold back the pattern tissue to the right size, like so:

But for curves such as sleeves and necklines, that doesn't work. Instead, do this. Using a pencil or a water-soluble marker, dot on your fabric the cutting line you need, under the pattern piece. Start at one end of the curve and fold the pattern piece back a bit at a time, making a dot every inch or so where the cutting line meets the fold of tissue. Like so:

You may have to continue from the other end of the cutting line when you get to the deepest part of the curve:

When you finish, cut on the dotted lines.  Your cut piece is now the right size, and you can save that same pattern for a few months down the road, when your darling child has grown to the next size.

You can see I used only four pins here.  Don't go pin crazy. The more you put in to begin with, the more you will have to remove while you are marking!

This transfer method also works well to mark darts, button holes, button placement, notches, and small/large pattern construction dots. You will want to do that before you remove the pattern piece. Water-soluble marker (found in the notions section) is great, especially if the person you made the garment for is extremely anxious to wear it. :)  But because marker may become difficult to remove if you accidentally iron over it, I prefer to use pencil.

Happy sewing!

She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.

Proverbs 31:13

It's Here!!

Kim and Kioko, Betz Johnson's long-awaited literary work, has finally been published!  Books are available for purchase, and book signing by the famous author will take place after church on Sunday (but only if you come for the preaching).

No, just kidding. My Father's house is not an house of merchandise.

She has been smiling like this all day. :)

Mission Accomplished

It seems like such a long time ago now, but last November my Betz, age 12 (then 11), wrote a 30,000 word novella for NaNoWriMo's (National Novel Writer's Month) Young Writer's Program. When she learned that CreateSpace was offering five free copies to finishers, she was determined to have her book printed!

That was not an easy task.  It required designing a cover, proofreading and re-proofreading the text of her book, formatting the text, titles, headings, and artwork to fit within CreateSpace's parameters, and doing some desperate magic tricks with software file formats. What a great education!  And Betz's determination paid off.  Her book is at the printer and will be shipped this week.  We can't wait to see it!

I am pretty pleased with my sweet girl.  :)

Of making of many books there is no end, 

Ecclesiastes 12:12

There Is Hope

Okay, even I can do this.  And by the way, this is a great homeschooler's garden project.  When you've  cut off your last stalk of celery, stick the base in a pot of dirt and water it.  Now you can grow your next bunch.  :)  

I think you're supposed to blanch celery... but I haven't gotten that far, yet. Anybody know?

Sewing Gussets or Godets -- Kwik Sew #3108

Certainly there must be one poor seamstress out there desperately Googling "how to sew in skirt gussets" (after all, that would have been me yesterday), and this tutorial is for you. 

I admit it, I am a rebel at heart, which is the reason why I  desperately needed a Saviour.  I still have trouble with this congenital drive to do a thing my OWN way, and sometimes at the most inconvenient times -- in this case, sewing.  I can NEVER just follow the instructions and leave a sewing pattern alone.  I have to either lengthen it, add a frill that wasn't in the pattern, alter the neckline, or use some sort of fabric other than what the pattern company suggests for that particular design.  

In this case I was making a skirt for Amy. I used a pattern that calls for something lightweight, like linen or rayon, and I had to use denim. So I made it a size bigger just in case thicker fabric in eight seams messed up the size calculations. I lengthened it 3", because she likes her skirts really long.  And I did NOT follow the instructions for the gussets! The last time I made this skirt it was for Betz. The gussets were a huge headache. I needed a fix. And for once, striking out on my own resulted in success!   

Here's the pattern I used. It's lovely! I made view B, the green one, for my 6'2" daughter.  It has eight gores with gussets at the bottom to make it fuller at the hem. I love the way this skirt appears to hang in the picture.  It's feminine and modest and pretty.

Kwik Sew only allows 1/4" for seams. That does not allow much room for error!  And, even if you had the usual 5/8" seams, cutting 1/8" wider, or making a 1/8" error sewing each piece of an eight-gore skirt will make it up to 2" bigger or smaller than you planned on. So cut carefully.  And, be sure to mark the dots accurately where the side seams and gussets match up!

The instructions for this pattern tell you to first sew one triangular gusset to each rectangular skirt piece (there are eight of each), then to sew each of those pieces together.  It should have worked, after all, it sounds simple enough.  But it wasn't. I ended up with bubbles at the tips of the gussets and stretched pieces that ended up not fitting together right.

Here's a gusset.  At the point I should have photo-shopped the dot in.  It's 1/4"  from each side seam, at the point, but here you can't see it.

Rather than following the pattern instructions, I sewed two side panels together from the top to the dot, and reinforced at the dot with a back-stitch.  The gusset goes here, between these two long pieces:

Working with the gusset on the underside, pin it right sides together to one of the rectangular pieces.

Boy, this isn't easy to see ...but sew the gusset to the side panel with gusset on the underside, starting with a backstitch right at the dot where you ended the previous stitching (two photos up). The side panel that is NOT being sewn should be folded back out of the way. Feel with your fingers for the fold. The dot should be right at the fold.  This view is the underside of what you are sewing.

Match the dots up!

Now, holding the point of the gusset, turn it to line up with the edge of the other side panel. Open out the seam of the side panels to keep the top one out of the way, and beginning right at the dot, sew the gusset to the remaining side panel.

 Here's how your seam looks now (below). Clip one side seam just above the gusset piece.

And voila!  A perfectly smooth point. Now repeat this whole process seven times.  If your fabric is ravelly you will want to finish the seams.  A zig-zag is good, or you can overlock.  Then press your side seams all in one direction, and press the gusset seams flat.  Finish the skirt as directed, like a good girl.

For Amy I top-stitched everything for a store-bought look.  She is very happy with the outcome, but next time I will move the dots up 3" and alter the gusset to be 3" taller, while keeping the same width across the bottom.  That will give her more width at the knees for activity.

Here's my sweet Amy in the finished product:

This is a RARE photo of Amy.  She is usually behind the camera, not in front of it. But she has clicked her new shutter at me so many times in the past few days, that she admittedly owed me this. :)

She seeketh wool, and flax [and denim], and worketh willingly with her hands.

Proverbs 31:13

Our community garden opens on May 1st, and we have a 10x10' plot to grow salad in.  The other day I picked up a wonderfully fragrant lime basil. I would plant it in my garden for the summer, then I would pot it and try to keep it alive in the house next winter.

The little basil was a bit limp and appeared as though it was possibly root-bound already, so I thought I would do it a good deed.  I re-potted it last night... and left it outside for some fresh air.  

The girls are shaking their heads and laughing at me, asserting that I am all thumbs where growing things are concerned. (And not GREEN thumbs, mind you.)

I hope this isn't a sign of things to come...

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, 

neither shall fruit be in the vines; 

the labour of the olive shall fail, 

and the fields shall yield no meat; 

the flock shall be cut off from the fold, 

and there shall be no herd in the stalls:

Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, 

I will joy in the God of my salvation.

Habakkuk 3:17,18

Stuff Going On (Marathon Post)

Welcome back to my blahg.  I really do need to make it worth your while and post something interesting... You know how it is when you feel like you're just taking up space on the planet?  Well, that's me lately, but I know God made me for a better purpose than to merely take up space. So, let's see if I can make a worthwhile contribution to life today.

Church:

Our little mission church is steady at about eighteen when everyone's there, and we have started a Sunday School class. I totally understand one of the the challenges of a pastor's job, in feeding the mature sheep as well as the babies.  In my Sunday school class I have Emily, who has lived in a Bible-loving pastor's home all her life, and who reads her own Bible daily, and three children who hardly know "Jesus Loves Me".  One precious "old" sheep and three precious little "lambs".   :)

While we are not big on age-segregated church, I look at a Sunday School class as a way to bless parents who want to and need to be able to attend to the preaching of God's word without distraction, and without their child being a distraction to others.  Before the kids can be trained to sit still, the moms and dads have to be trained to do the training. We are so far gone from the days when both adults AND children could pay attention for an hour; it won't ever come back in a general sense. This generation is visually oriented and dependent on activity to hold our attention. But children can still be trained to sit quietly and to listen, and even to take something home with them from the preaching. This can't be accomplished by a Sunday School teacher, though. Their parents have to work with them at home.  That's another blog post.

But Sunday School is not a baby-sitting service.  I want my sweet little students to see themselves as God sees them (either in Christ or without him), to learn to love Jesus and his word, and to desire to do right and go God's way when they are faced with decisions.  We sing a few songs, including "I'm In the Lord's Army" (because the kids love it and it's good for getting rid of wiggles), work on memorizing a practical Bible verse together, and have a Bible lesson.  I am not good at doing this while having to interrupt myself a dozen times with, "Sit down," or "Come back here," and "Don't touch that," but God will equip me. He has probably equipped me already for every challenge; I just need to take a good inward look at my God-given talents and instincts to see what's still useable, and dust those tools off.  I also need to put away, some of my non-useable clutter, such as impatience and rigid expectations.


School:
You know we have a graduate. Yay! The other academic students, well... that end-of-the-year initiative has disappeared into thin air.  I was hoping to be finished with school before we go to Family Camp, but that is just not going to happen.  It's my fault -- I have about as much motivation as the girls do.  Algebra fell by the wayside along about last February.  Integrated circuits are not holding our interest in the least.  Spelling is too easy.  And English... arghh! English! Why can't we just learn to speak properly, and forget about sentence patterns, voice, and direct objects???  Is there a curriculum that focuses just on usage????? It will be a big challenge to find the right fit for next year.  That will require some prayer.

Betz is planning to self-publish the novella that she wrote for the 2011 NaNoWriMo, and the editing is my job.  It's the perfect way to see if our kids have a handle on English grammar.  I see we need to work on quotes -- where the commas go, how to avoid a splice, etc.  How much better it is to learn these things as we use them. Writing works great.  I have a deadline... must get that finished soon.

In the school of life, things are going great.  Alison and Amy and I signed up for our town's first annual Citizens Academy.  We are learning all the ins and outs of local government, and it has been very fun and informative.  Last week we learned about our little police department.  I am happy to say we are under-patrolled, as there seems to be a correlation between the number of policemen and the number of crimes, and it's not what you might think.  When the police force grows, the crimes increase, as was the case in a different small town where we lived in the early 90's.

Traffic Stop Scenario

 An "alarm" has gone off, and an outside door is open.
Cute Mrs. S. conducts a building search, with some tips from the officer.

We have also learned about the tax levy and how it is determined and spent, other ways the city makes money, what all the administrative people do, what the planning committee does,  how the waste water treatment plant works (that is actually quite fascinating!)... and how all these departments work together. Our assignments are to find a way to reduce the levy by ten percent and to design a master twenty-year plan. We graduate in two weeks and will get a polo shirt for our perfect attendance, along with our mugs in the local paper.

Also in life school, Amy is just as determined as ever to hone her skills as a future photographer.  Having a camera is now helping tremendously! Knowing how to do photography without using a camera is a little bit like reading up on how to play the piano, and saying you can play. Amy diligently saved her "mom's helper" money and did TONS of research (good skill, that one!), and she finally bought a very nice DSLR -- too much camera for me.  I just need a little point-and-shoot for memories' sake. You know, so I can store all those photos on the computer somewhere and never look at them.  The old 35mm cameras did have their advantages.

Furthermore, the man of the house enrolled in Nathan Maxwell's ITonRamp Computer Essentials course. Alison and I are also participating by watching the weekly webinars and doing the assignments. Between the three of us, certainly we will have enough know-how to fix our own computers when this course is over, and maybe we'll even be able to fix other people's computers. That's the goal, anyway.  One of us will get A+ certification, and hopefully that will open a door to generate some extra income and to be a blessing to others.  We certainly have been blessed by other people's techie knowledge; it would be a thrill to be able to pass that along.

*     *     *     *     *

Certainly most important of our recent goings-on is the Lord's working in our hearts.  I am thrilled when I see my girls growing in the Lord.  This is evidenced to me mostly by their continued interest in the preaching of God's word and in their willingness to provide the special music for church, and also by their kindnesses to others.  I, too, have had the Lord working on me (he's never finished, though!), drawing me ever closer to him, drawing me away from my own pride and selfishness one millimeter at a time.  I do so wish I could "lay aside the weight which doth so easily beset [me]" by the miles, rather than in millimeters. I think that's probably what God intended... my immediate and generous obedience.  Funny how the lessons we try to teach our children come back and get us, isn't it? Today I finished reading aloud to Emily, The Quest for Thunder Mountain, by Ed Dunlop, our of our family's favorite authors. See my old post. The theme of the story is the joy of finding God's will for one's life, and all the angst that can also come with that. I probably benefited from it more than Em did. I could greatly identify with the character who feared the king's will for his life might be something dreadful.  :)

*     *     *     *     *

One more thing:  Rob Robin has been awfully territorial lately, chasing our other bird visitors from the feeder.  As it turns out, Rob is really Robynne Robin, the mother of several babes still in their eggs in a nest under the deck!  She has been protecting her treasure.  I wonder if this is the same pair we had last year?  Do robins return to the same nest?

*     *     *     *     *

Thank you all for staying with me, if you are still with me.  Wow, I haven't talked this much at one time in ages.

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise:

and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding. 

Proverbs 17:28