I said before that sometimes I feel as if I were born in the wrong century. More often, I feel like I was born in the wrong country. Pardon me while I ramble for a bit. I am trying to unravel some thoughts.

Late one night, when I was about eight, I sneaked a flashlight under my covers to finish the last book in a series I had been devouring. When I finished the book I closed the cover, and crawled out of bed. I went to the kitchen to find my mom, forgetting that there was a group of adults over for the evening, all laughing and playing Monopoly. They stopped and turned to stare at me as I stood there in my pajamas, feeling totally embarrassed. I finally found my mom’s eye and could contain myself no longer. I burst into tears declaring, “Oh mom, I want to live in Narnia!” I don’t remember what happened after that- probably some amusement and some confusion. I think my mother thought I was crazy as she hurried me, sobbing, out of the room.

The book I had been reading was of course The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. Many children have been affected in the same way by the Chronicles of Narnia, some even going so far as to take a hatchet to the back of their parents wardrobe, hoping to get into that magical land. The Last Battle gripped me hard as a child, and still does today because the majority of the book is a nightmare of a story. Nothing goes right- all the plans to save Narnia end in disaster. And just when you want to slam the book in despair, you see that the upheaval suddenly rights itself and all that was dark has become light. It is I think, the most compelling view of heaven I have ever read.

Many of you know that years ago we suffered the loss of our only daughter, Hosanna. She would be seven years old this month if she had lived, and I always think of her at this time of the year. We never got to see her alive, and after she was born, the nurse brought her back to us, dressed in a tiny handmade dress and a little knit hat that someone out there had lovingly made and donated to the hospital for cases such as ours. I had never thought to prepare anything for her. I was so grateful that someone had. I have been asking myself lately, as I work on dainty little dresses, why I feel compelled to do this kind of work. Am I trying to fill some kind of void? Why spend so much time and energy on mere clothing that will be stained and torn and outgrown in a few short months? Is clothing really important in the big scheme of things?

I remember sighing audibly at a church baby shower for a little girl just a few months after Hosanna died. I looked at the piles of pink and ruffled frocks and tried not to imagine how my own little girl would have looked in them. A sweet friend sitting next to me noticed my dejection and gently suggested that I try to imagine what glorious clothing my baby was wearing now. I have thought of her comment often since then, wondering what kind of clothing we will wear in heaven, and why, when Adam and Eve were perfect and naked in the garden, we will need clothing at all in the afterlife. The scriptures certainly mention our being clothed in heaven. And they are full of other clothing imagery as well- the taking off of the old life, and the putting on of the new. As a metaphor at the very least, clothing seems important.

But coming back around to Narnia, we see that Lewis takes that imagery and runs with it. We read as four children must pass through a wardrobe and clothe themselves in furs (a bit too big for them yet, but put on nonetheless) in order to enter Narnia. We watch as Narnia shakes off it’s winter robes at the coming of Aslan. Edmund significantly leaves his furs behind when he goes to betray the others. Aslan’s glorious mane is shorn off at death, only to return in resurrection, scattering beams of light. In a later book, Eustace must have his dragon’s hide torn off by Aslan, because all his clumsy attempts have been useless. But Aslan does not leave Eustace naked- he gives him new clothing. It is not enough to be stripped of your sin. You must put on Christ and his righteousness as a garment. Narnia helped me to understand this.

The fact is, I was born in the wrong country. I was not made for this world, or Narnia for that matter. All these longings to be conformed to the image of God, these desires to be in that ‘other place’, to change beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and a garment of praise for the spirit of grief- even an eight year old girl feels that pull. My daughter went straight from this life to her true home. She never had to read the allegory of Narnia to help her understand what God is trying to prepare us for in eternity. She never had to ask to be clothed in Christ’s righteousness. But we must take the longer road. We enter through the wardrobe, put on those heavy furs, and push on through the snow, looking for Aslan, waiting for springtime.

“An original idea? That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.”  Stephen Fry

Anyone else out there a fan of Stephen Fry?
Jeeves and Wooster?
P.G. Wodehouse?

This isn’t a blog about British comedy or I would elaborate.  I just found his quote to be hilarious.  I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be original so I had to go to an online library to find an original quote about being original.  Turns out, there are a lot of people thinking about this same question.  Is there a genuinely  original thought out there, or is there nothing new under the sun?

And why this need to be original?  Why do we want to be unique? To be the first person to think of something whether it be an idea, a product, or just a pithy quote.  Do we want to make money, be famous, or just stand out in some way? Or is it something deeper?   You read about those people who had just the right idea with the right circumstances at the right time to create something original. An overnight success.  Wouldn’t it be nice?

But it is never that simple.  There really is nothing new under the sun.  We are all building on someone else’s creations, all the way back to the original Creator.  I have this conversation with my boys all the time-

“Who made you?”

“God.”

“What else did God make?”

“God made all things.”

Pretty straight forward, right?  But then they get confused.  I have overheard arguments such as this:

“You better not rip the coloring book, ’cause God made it. ”

“Nuh uh, God didn’t make it, Walmart did.”

Then in sails the wise mother to sort it all out.  Of course they are both right.  God didn’t actually make the coloring book, but He made everything that made the coloring book.  So we go back to the origins and we make a game out of it-

“Who made the people that made the coloring book?”

“Who made the trees to make the paper that made the coloring book?”

“Who made the wax for the crayons to color the coloring book?”

Then I have to pause to try to remember where wax comes from and we end up doing an hour of Google searches on different kinds, from ear wax to candle wax, ending with a Youtube documentary on Crayola.  That is what homeschool looks like around here some days.

All that to say, I believe we are made in God’s image.  He is the great Original, the great Creator.  We want to be like him in our feeble attempts to create and our innate longings for originality.  But the question I think I often ignore is not who made us and everything, but why?

The sing-song answer on my boys lips is of course, “For his own glory”, but what a statement!

If he creates for his own glory, then we, made in his image, get to create for our own glory? Ah, there is the rub and the great temptation.  We want to glorify ourselves by claiming gifts from God as our own.  God is the only one who has the right to glorify himself, since He is the only true originator.  But he shares it with us, folks.  He shares it with us, for his own glory.

Our local library is itty bitty. It is so small that I hardly ever take the time to browse the few shelves they have. I usually just stop for a quick run in, to pick up the books I have ordered online from the huge downtown library where I hate going because there is never any parking. Anyways….

All that to say, I can’t remember what led me to pick up a copy of Alabama Stitch Book at our itty bitty library that fateful day. I think it caught my eye because the binding was bright red (my favorite color) and it was a book about stitching in the cookbook section(two of my favorite things). Whatever the reason, I checked it out and as I flipped through the down home recipes and unique sewing projects, I fell in love.

It was written by a woman named Natalie Chanin who started a cottage industry in her Alabama home town selling hand made clothing for women out of cotton jersey. You know, the stuff they make tee shirts out of? I have sewn with a lot of fabrics, but I never thought to use jersey. I never thought you could make anything nice out of t-shirt material, but this woman was creating art work with it. And every stitch of it by hand.

I loved the colors she chose, the patterns she used, the time tested sewing methods she learned from her grandmother, and her old fashioned, waste not, want not approach to crafting. But her products are hardly old fashioned. They are like nothing I have ever seen.

I bought my first yard of cotton jersey shortly after that, the hubby bought me her other two books for Christmas, and I have hardly worked on any other project since. Some of her methods I have had a hard time getting used to. I mean, she doesn’t hem anything for goodness sake. What would my mother say? Her clothing is an interesting mix of simple and elaborate, rustic and elegant, but I love it because she gives you all her patterns, all her methods, and lets you make it yourself if you want. And since her ready made pieces are not exactly affordable for me at this point in my life, that is what I started to do.

One problem, of course. All this takes time. Lots of it. And I struggle with feeling guilty for spending hours and hours on a dress just for myself. Then my sister had a baby girl. I had plenty of scraps around, and a nice used t-shirt is just the right size for a baby dress. I sized down the patterns and stencils and finished the dress in a drastically shorter amount of time. An idea was born, and I am going with it. I don’t know where it will take me, but here are a few more dresses I posted on Etsy yesterday.

Oh, and Natalie Chanin is coming to town next week. I am going to try to meet her.

As yesterday’s post indicated, I have been sewing for a while now.   I learned to operate a sewing machine around age eleven, and while I enjoyed fiddling around with it, I did a lot more hand sewing in those early years. I went through a long cross stitch phase, and much of my free time in high school was spent making little exes on fabric. If that confession makes you think I must have been a lot of fun in high school, you may be thinking wrong.

 I never knew what to do with the finished products, so my mother was usually the recipient. Like all good mothers, she still has many of them stuck on her walls.  The last cross stitch I attempted was some floofy ice fairy or something, which I got well into before I realized that stitching a white ice fairy on white fabric was boring me to death!   And what was I going to do with it if I ever finished?   I needed to find something more useful to do.  So I went back to the sewing machine, and started making clothes for myself and eventually quilts.  The practical side of me was satisfied.  Am I boring you yet?

Fast forward about fifteen years.  Picture me married with three little boys, living in a tiny apartment in Memphis.  We moved there temporarily to be close to the hubby and his job, and we brought only the bare minimum with us.  We had no t.v., no computer, not even books .  I had no friends, no car most days, and no sewing machine.  And did I mention it was 180 degrees outside everyday?  I thought I would go crazy from housebound boredom.  

Digging through the few boxes we brought, I found my fabric scraps.   I was pondering how I could make use of all the tiny bits of random calico with no sewing machine, when I thought of my grandmother and her tin box of hexagon flowers.  She had left the beginnings of that quilt to my mother, who had attempted at various times to finish it without success.    I also remembered a conversation my aunts once had about how many depression era women, those women who used every scrap of everything, had similar boxes in their attic.  No one ever finished one of those quilts, they laughed.  I took it as a personal challenge. 

For the three months we lived in Memphis, I did little else but work on that quilt.  And over the next three years, I did it sporadically.  It is now in it’s final stage.  It may be in its final stage for another three years and my aunts might be proved right in the end.  

But what I have come to realize is that sewing by hand is the best deterrent I have found to counteract my tendencies to sloppiness, cutting corners, and generally rushing a job, just to say it is done.

 I am not a detail oriented person, and zipping an item through a sewing machine usually means more time undoing mistakes because I am not paying attention. Or I just leave the mistakes because who has the time to fix them, and I have to get this sewing machine out of the way so I can get dinner on the table.  In short, sewing by hand allows me a quiet corner to sit, relax, and do better work.

It also means my boys won’t crawl under the table, push the pedal on my machine and run my fingers over with the needle.  It’s the little things, right?