House Art Journal

A catechism-of-life lesson I tend to give my children when we go fruit picking is, "What does this tree tell us about God?" When He says He will look after our needs, how does He do this? Is He sparing, giving us only what we need? Or is He generous? Does He give us far more than we could possibly ever need The children look at the branches heavily laden with fruit, and at the fruit scattered everywhere on the ground, so much that you can barely walk without stepping on one, and they conclude "He is generous!" Amen!

My husband is our breakfast cook on the weekends, and one of his specialties is sausages cooked with apples. Simply fry the sausage in a covered pan on low heat, covered with sliced apple rings and sprinkled with brown sugar, until the apples are soft and the sausage is cooked through. We indulged a few weeks ago: here is one small portion with a buttered scone and cup of tea.

Following my upbringing in a charismatic covenant community, our family does "Celebrating the Lord's Day" prayers before and after the Saturday night and Sunday night meals. A sort of combination of the Liturgy of the Hours Evening I and II prayers and the Jewish Sabbath prayers, it's a tradition we retained when we drifted away from regular charismatic expression. I love the simple ritual of it, and the aura of solemnity it always gives our Sunday evening dinners. We made our own booklets out of parchment printer paper, as you can see. To make your own, you can download a PDF of the prayers here . And here is a page that gives some additional links. (Note: Blogger seems determined to blog these URLs for some reason. So here are the direct links: The PDF is http://sos-nar.com/Lord's%20Day%20Materials/Celebrate.pdf And http://sos-nar.com/lord's_day.htm is the additional resources link. Cut and paste them into your browser window if you have to!) My daughter ...

Filling out the final categories, casual clothes, turned out to be the hardest for me, because I have a lot of casual shirts. Plus we're still in the middle of "warm fall strangeness" and it hasn't yet become cold enough for me, in Virginia, to definitively put away my tank tops (I'm wearing one now). And there is the matter of my still-expanding pregnant waistline, which makes negotiating the lower half of the wardrobe tricky. So I cheated on the 35-item system - for now. Once the cold weather goes in, I shall banish the final remnants of the summer wardrobe and hopefully will report on having 35 pieces alone in my closet! Thanks to those of you who read and enjoyed this series: many of you raised questions I'm still pondering: including how to apply this to young children. I think I may do that soon: my toddlers have too many clothes right now. I used to have a system in place when I had two children, but I let that fall by the wayside. When I revisit...

To me, one of the funnest parts of being a woman is being able to dress up. I thank God I am not a man, forced to wear a suit and tie as the only socially acceptable way to celebrate. So even though the life of a housewife might not seem as glamorous as the life of a socialite or executive, I enjoy having some nice things in the till for a night out on the town. And even Sunday Mass, that weekly celebration of a more celestial sort, provides time for adornment. So, continuing on with the organization, my job was now to cut down my fall Sunday wardrobe to seven pieces of clothing. Fortunately this wasn't too hard this time around: staples for Sunday dress-up for me include my black wool suit (Talbots and going strong!) which fortunately still fits a pregnant figure, and a white silk blouse. I'd purchased a blue print skirt-and-blouse set on clearance (mostly to match a favorite vintage purse) and I can mix and match the suit and that set quite nicely. I also included a brown 80...

Just to post to say I really, really want to get back to posting my clothing series, but life has overwhelmed me just now. But I will get back to it, I promise! In the meantime, hope you enjoy this picture of the baby enjoying hot chocolate milk on one of the rare cold mornings we've been having this fall.... (It's actually the Reliv chocolate supplement, but she thinks it's cocoa, and I don't mind!)

So -- now the challenge after ruthless paring down was to separate each of the remaining pieces of clothing (which still numbered way more than 35) into one of the five categories I'd determined: (see the circle chart below) 1. purple circle: dressing up, the 'glam' clothing 2. red circle: daily Mass and shopping or visiting 3. brown circle: yard work, super casual clothing 4. green circle: ordinary casual clothes for housework (not as casual as #3) 5. blue circle: Sunday Mass clothing I started with the category of going to daily morning Mass, which right now I do three times a week, and I have this "thing" about not wearing pants to Mass. Like I said, I tend to use any excuse to dress up. If you check the chart below (and ignore how horribly I numbered it) you can see that I was trying to fill out this category by picking eight items that I could wear to daily Mass and for slightly dressy occasions, like visiting. Two of these items had to be able to be worn in ...

The first part of organization is ineviably, paring down. And that brings with it the sometimes heartbreaking exercise of detaching yourself from things you once loved. (Yes, loved in the lower, materialistic sense, but nevertheless, loved.) So, in my effort to cut down my wardrobe, I gathered all my clothes from off-season storage and the cranies of the laundry basket and heaped them on the bed. I did the same with all my accessories: purses, scarves, shoes, and jewelry. Then the winnowing began: ruthlessly purging the unfit: clothing that was stained or getting straggly, clothes that really didn't fit me except in my fantasies, clothes that I never got around to wearing, and so on. Then I further winnowed out the remaining spring and summer clothes (farewell blue and green, till summer when we meet again!) as well any clothes that won't fit my third-trimester-pregnant figure. Also excised were maternity clothes from the last baby that were just too worn or out of style. I con...

Forgive this intrusion into the Clothes Organization series, but I thought it might be of interest to some... This past summer, I gave a talk called "No Matter What Happens, Blessed Be His Name" at the Midwest Catholic Family Conference . It was the first time that I spoke about losing our son, Joshua Michael , in public. It was a hard talk to give, but I'm told that it helped people in the audience who were going through their own bouts with suffering. In the talk, I retell the Biblical story of Job and share how I found that God's story about suffering had real applicability to what our family experienced. I just found out that the talk is available on CD from St. Joseph Communications for $7.00. To order, call Monica at 1800-526-2151, ext. #413. Or, you can email her at monica@saintjoe.com . The item number for the talk is #MWCFC07-CDM#8.

Thanks for the encouragement, all! So, in the effort to pare down my thrift store wardrobe, I spent about a week trying to come up with a template that would work for me. It had to be specific, because my wardrobe is no ordinary set of clothing. No indeed, it is specially tailored to the tastes of one person in particular: my husband Andrew. Andrew likes two kinds of clothing on me: polished, simple, Audrey-Hephburn style clothing in strong colors and soft textures, and totally casual farm clothing like checked shirts and jeans. No prints, no muted or muddy colors, nothing too dramatic or too flouncy. Just simple, cute clothes. At least that's what his taste has currently evolved to this season. Of course, Andrew's never actually come out and told me this. Are you kidding? No, this is based on thirteen years of careful research, note-taking, and stealth inquiry. Because as most women can tell you, men are rarely forthcoming about what they like in clothing, and the question, ...

The change of seasons brings about the inevitable changing of the wardrobe. I'm forever trying to come up with some organizational model for reining in the amount of clothing in my closet. About a decade ago, I first formulated the plan known as the Seven-Dress wardrobe, (also known as Liturgical Dressing ) which worked well - for a while! But I confess I found it hard to maintain such a minimalist approach to dressing, and age took its toll on both my figure and my ability to regularly sew myself a new wardrobe. Now, some ten years after writing the above article, I'm back to my old standby: thrift store dressing, and for some reason, keeping up with the fashion scene has become more important to me as I age. But when you shop constantly at thrift stores and through bags of hand-me-downs, wardrobes have a way of ballooning out of proportion just as much the closets of those who hit the mall every Saturday. I still find myself in need of a template, a directive for how much...

Sorry I've been on hiatus, but we just started homeschooling again. I'm with the Classical Conversations program, and our group just started this past Tuesday. So - given that right now, I am busier than I have ever been in my entire life - I put off starting school till the group program started. So I spent last week organizing homeschool material that will hopefully be moved into the new addition sometime next month. But right now I am fortunate to be able to fit everything into a computer armoire, due to my husband's generosity in buying it for me when it was on sale two years ago. The armoire hides the messy avalanche that schoolwork had become over the summer, but now the avalanche is eradicated and safely filed and labeled in our file box system. Everything else is organized in four wooden magazine files from IKEA (which sadly, don't fit binders, their one flaw), two metal bins which slide onto shelves below, and in a desk organizer, which is not the Truly Useful...

Here's another photo and commentary from Catholic writer Catherine Fournier : One of the nice things about moving into a new house after living for a long time (in our case 18 years) in one spot, is that you discover new things about your furniture and decorations. Suddenly, in a different arrangement or in a different light, that chair or dresser you took for granted takes on a whole new beauty. This mirror was my mother-in-law's; she inherited it from her parents. Initially, I didn't find its ornate, elaborate style terribly appealing, but a mirror is a mirror and it was useful in our bedroom. As you can see, it's not very exciting hung against a plain white wall (though the cutie in the reflection is quite nice!) I only kept it when we were moving because it was a family-piece and may well have been one of the first "beautiful" objects her parents bought after spending years struggling as Ukrainain settlers in Manitoba. But in our new house, with its much ...

A few months ago in June I blogged about visiting Molly and Bill McGovern and their delightful little family farmette, Oliver Hill . This weekend I received a plea for emergency help from Molly. They were able to buy the farm because they purchased a sub-prime loan: at the time, this was their only option. Last year, they lost their baby son Oliver to SIDS, and then Bill lost his job as a result of all the time he took off to take care of his family during the crisis. Not to be kept down, Bill started his own business as a home health care aide, Oliver Hill Home Health Care . As an aside, he is thriving in the business: he's a big teddy bear of a man with years of emergency medicine experience. He specializes in helping older men with their health needs in their homes: for those of us who know Bill, this job is a perfect fit for his warm, compassionate personality, and his clients and their families have nothing but praise for his work. Molly has been holding classes in sewing and ...

My friend, Canadian writer Catherine Fournier , kindly allowed me to post some photos of the rennovation of their upstairs hall, with commentary. Thanks for sharing, Catherine! Upstairs Hall When I arrange a room and begin to decorate it, I think first about what the area will be used for, who will see it, then traffic patterns, then about ease of maintenance (keeping it clean and tidy.) I usually try to develop a theme for the colours, pictures and knick-knacks. In the case of our upstairs hall, it started with finding a (safe) place for our statue of Mary; somewhere where she’d be properly and respectfully seen without being in danger of being knocked over, always a hazard in the large-footed & large-elbowed Fournier household. Once she was in place I realized that this transient zone –in my opinion you can be a little more overstated or emphatic in an area where people just pass through than in a room where people sit and stay – would work well as a “Marian devotions” area. This...

At times I feel like a snob for admitting it, but plastic things really upset my sense of beauty. I can tolerate it in the house at times (yes, I do own Tupperware!) but when it comes to plastic outside, the contrast between the artificialness of plastic riding toys, swingsets, etc. and the vibrancy and realness of the natural world is jarring. So whenever I can, I try to find ways to eliminate outdoor plastic fixtures. I find that for babies, a galvanized metal tub makes a fun wading pool. While it's not really big enough to swim it, it definitely takes the edge off the last hot days of summer. And even bigger kids like to soak in it. I've found that one of these tubs (we just "upgraded" from a 30 gallon to a 45 gallon model this summer - $25 at the hardware store) and a good sprinkler is all the water fun my small children need. And this fall, we can use it for bobbing for apples. :)

Years ago my friend Joan introduced me to the art and work of William Morris , the ecclectic genius of the Arts and Crafts movement of the last 1800's. Although not Catholic, Morris was fascinated by the art that was birthed by Catholic culture, and used his considerable fortune to fund the production of paintings, books, fabric, wallpaper, furniture, and architecture that paid homage to medieval art. He sought with mixed success to raise the level of popular culture in his day and age, away from mass production and towards the appreciation of what he considered to be true culture. Ironically, he never embraced the faith of the intensely Christian culture he sought to emulate, but spent his life a child of the wind, flying from one philosophy to another. I suspect that if he was saved in the end, it would be because that his heart was wiser than his head. Above is one of his popular patterns, Briarwood Manor, one of my favorites. Different companies release new versions of...

Contrary to what I just wrote on my site on Facebook , I admit that there are some times when the colors blue and orange look good together: such as in nature, exemplified by these tiger lilies in a cobalt-blue vase. The warm orange-brown of the saltshakers is also a nice complement. Okay, so I would never wear orange and blue together, but sometimes they do look just splendid. But for me, I need to add a splash of green. We usually think of dark green candles as being more appropriate for fall or Christmas, but I love how they combine with cobalt blue: during the hot days of summer, blue and green is the ultimate cooling combo. And I was delighted to find this unusual bright green homemade doily at a flea market (I always look through piles of old linens for finds like this one! It was only a dollar.). Stay cool!

I wanted to post this revised version of Joshua's memorial stone to thank those of you who gave us feedback on the earlier version. As you can see, we added a Sacred Heart and cross to the stone, and Ben Hatke added leaves and mushrooms (in homage to hobbits). Here's a closeup of our family crest, which we created in fun with the Hatkes years ago, but which we're making official by including it on this gravestone. The Latin motto is "audacia et prudentia" - courage and prudence. The Siamese cat supposedly stands for courage: the black hen with an egg stands for prudence. The tree represents Christ, the stars represent the Church, and our Blessed Mother is represented by the moon. It might take us two years to actually have the stone made, but I'm grateful to see the design completed at last. Thanks again for your suggestions and prayers!

For some time now, I've been collecting glass bottles in different colors. I'll pay for small bottles that are cobalt blue, light blue, or green (my price is no more than $3 per bottle - usually I pay $1 or less for the small ones at flea markets). The clear and brown glass ones just come my way from medications and herbal supplements. When arranged in a group or in a line on the counter (this is the backsplash of our stove), I like the color combination. And they're great for those times of year when small meadow flowers like dandelions or daisies bloom, tempting small children to bring their mommy a bouquet on every trip outdoors.