Put-together

I spent some time this morning butchering a worn-out sheet.  Some of the better parts I am saving for sewing projects, and the rest became kitchen wipes.

Last week I pulled out my old wardrobe planning booklets that I had made, which were very helpful in figuring out what I need to do next wardrobe-wise.

Among the books we've acquired over the last few months was a very interesting one:  The Doll's Dressmaker, by Venus Dodge, which has lots of ideas and patterns for dolls' clothing.  Most of them can be scaled up for human clothing.

The children are of course thinking ahead to Halloween and what their costumes will be.  One of the older ones has put together a very impressive cardboard Stars Wars stormtrooper helmet, and is now looking for a source of EVA foam floor tiles for some other part of the costume.

Sabbatical revelation

In my book on sabbaticals, I showed how God had on several Biblical occasions used times of rest to establish covenants with people:  Noah after the Flood, Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai after their liberation from the Egyptians, and Nehemiah and the Israelites after the Exile.

I was shown another one today:  God's covenant with David in II Samuel 7--also mentioned in Psalm 89--after "the LORD had given him rest round about from all his enemies".

  

Heritage

Child is home from the hospital, much improved.

Inheritance these days is mostly nonlinear/nonlineage.  I made it to an estate sale over the weekend.  Husband reported that their sign said they would be charging half-price in the afternoon.  I got there just as they were changing their sign to "Everything free".  Clearly the old person's children didn't want to deal with it any more than they had to.  Most of what was left at that point was furniture, not of interest to me at this stage, but I found a couple of bags of useful items, a desk lamp that a child needed, and a large wooden drying rack.  

I also found a vintage wooden sewing machine case at a yard sale; no machine, just the case.  I bought it for the hinges that the machine slides onto, to replace one for my great-grandmother's machine that was lost sometime after the last move.

The hinges turned out to not be the right depth for the sewing machine cabinet, but the case was a close enough fit for the sewing machine, and now it will be a lot easier to store it somewhere besides on the library desk.  I think I can make the hinges work for the cabinet later on by putting in a new piece of oak where they meet.

What we stock up for...

...is the next round of unpleasant unplanned major expenses and impediments.  Which has now begun.

The child in the hospital is doing much better, although still not out of the woods.  I don't know when he will be able to come home.  People from church brought us a lot of food, and are willing to bring more as soon as we need it, and on top of that some of them are real prayer warriors.

It has been also been good to have the new musical instruments around the house, to pick up and blow some air through now and then.  My littlest children very quickly learned how to get the trumpet to toot.  I looked up the manufacturer online, and the trumpet could be a century old.  Transitioning to an open-hole flute has been much easier than I thought it would be.

I had decided a while back to get going with the hand weights and some simple exercises again, despite being somewhat wiped out from anemia.  That has been helpful with the added workload of a sick child.