Weekly Links: on clean houses, that one TV hairstyle, and more!

Jack is judging you.

SOME GOOD READING FOR YOUR SUNDAY AFTERNOON...

Faith

-"Reading the Danvers Statement II" - about men and women and the Bible. Here's a snippet:

Sure, these scriptures are for every culture. Nobody reading the bible should think that it is ever just for them. It is for the whole world. And so every single culture should read the bible. But that’s the point. I think every person should read the bible–the whole bible. And when that happens, some interesting things might happen.

-"Why I Quit Watching Downton Abbey" - on suffering and stories (maybe I put this link in the wrong section); here's a snippet:

The best way to honor sad stories is to simply present them as such. To not rush to a tidy conclusion, to not veer quickly off into either redemption or revenge. To honor the victim, to look unblinkingly at the trauma, to hold the story in your heart and then to tell others—this is what we are supposed to do.

Family

-"9 Habits of One Mother Trying to Keep a Clean Home" - I admit to reading this more than once. Bethany is pretty inspiring.

Fiction

-"Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station" - another good one from Lightspeed. Remember those choose-your-own-adventure paperbacks back from when we were kids? This short story is that style, but hilariously pessimistic.

-"The Overlooked Hope for Narnia's Susan Pevensie" - I admit to thinking something similar before. Such a good rebuttal to the popular view that Lewis was just being a sexist pig when it came to Susan! (Not that maybe he couldn't have been sometimes - and he'd be the first one to admit he was a sinner with blindspots - but I've always thought the popular criticism of Susan's fate was unfair, and this article's a good take on that.)

-"Why Everyone on TV Has the Same Hair" - I found this fascinating, because I'd noticed this (extremely boring visually) trend. The explanation makes sense! (But still folks: change it up!)


Hope the rest of your weekend is restful and good!
-Jessica Snell

Braiding Long Hair

My hair's reaching past my mid-back now, and I've noticed that some of my old reliable updos don't work quite as well with this much hair. So I've been poking around the internet, looking for new ideas. Here's today's experiment, based on this youtube tutorial:

You divide your hair in two sections, and then French braid it, taking only from the bottom, and holding the braid out to the side so that you have lots of slack. Then you pull each braid to the opposite side of the head and pin it, hiding the ends. This lets the slack fall along the back of the head, curtain-like. Very elegant, I think.

But looking from the side, it's doesn't appear so different from a crown braid:

My hair was a bit too long to finish it the way the lady on the tutorial video did; I had to put little clips at the part to hide the tip-ends of my braids, since they reached all the way around:

But overall, I'm pleased! I think I'm going to experiment with new styles for the next week or so, to see if I can't find some other things that work.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

"Is this a purely hypothetical question?"

Jess: hey, you know what would make the twins really easy to tell apart?
Jess: If one of them had bangs
Jess: isn't that a good idea?
Adam: um...
Adam: I suppose.
Jess: well
Adam: Is this a purely hypothetical question?
Jess: LUCY thought it was a good idea.
Jess: And, no,
Jess: no, it isn't.
Adam: hehehehe

a snood for everyday

Isn't "snood" a perfectly ugly word? So sorry I couldn't think of a prettier way to word the title of this post!

Anyway, I've made this pattern before, but I wanted to make another one; this time I wanted to make one that would go with just about everything.

So I picked a crochet thread about the color of my hair: just plain brown. I like the result:

I think I'll get a lot of use out of this, though probably not until the winter comes 'round again. During the summer, I really like my hair off my neck please, and even this hairstyle is too hot for comfort.

But during the winter, this is an easy, simple way to wear my hair, and now I have an everyday snood, a work-a-day snood: it's the blue jeans of snoods. ;)

Snood, snood, snood. If I say it over and over again, will it sound less ugly? SNOOOOOOD. Nope.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Crocheted Finished Object: the Orphan Scarf

The name of this scarf, designed by Doris Chan, comes from that fact that you can make it from an "orphaned" ball of sock yarn. I actually wanted a short scarf, and so I used even less than that.

This is another one of those clever-but-simple patterns: it's just single crochet, the easiest stitch there is. But you work the single crochet with, how can I put this? negative tension? Basically, you make it as loose as possible, and then, when it's finished, stretch it as hard as you can. And you end up with this:

I think this will be a good scarf for summer, because it's so lightweight and lacy. Also a nice little project if you have a bit of leftover yarn. I have a tiny bit of laceweight leftover from my mossy spiral scarf, and I think I might use it to make another one of these, probably a little narrower.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Crocheted FO's: bad-haircut beanie and Marian's Hood

I gave my husband a bad haircut. Since he has very short hair, the badness of the haircut ceased to be apparent within about two days. But I'd already decided that I owed him a hat, so several weeks after the hair cut in question, I presented him with this:

(The trimming of the fine mustache and beard, happily, I have nothing to do with.)

I'm very pleased with the hat (so is he). I used a self-striping sock yarn - first time using one! The striping of the yarn made this otherwise boring pattern (made it up myself: it's just a slowly-increasing single crochet circle, worked even once it was wide enough to fit around the sides of his head) fun to work. The yarn is a bamboo-wool mix, making it bright & warm.

Then, I finished a project for myself. I have fairly thick hair, which I wear up most of the time, usually in pinned braids or some sort of chignon. This - along with the fact that I (don't laugh!) have a big head (no, literally!) - means that it's hard to find hats that fit. And, even if they fit, shoving them over my hair usually messes up whatever hairstyle I've got going. So when I saw this project in Interweave Crochet, I thought, ah-ha! a solution! (Forgive my sober expression - it's hard to take pictures of yourself!)

It's a crocheted hood, like the hood on a jacket, but just all by itself, and buttoned at the neck. It has fun cables down the side and I used a pretty green yarn made of wool and mohair. I really like how it turned out. And, yes, it fits over my hair without disarranging it too much. Yay!

(Look, see? This picture shows how I actually feel about how it turned out.)

It's so fun to work on projects like this. I'm having way too much fun with yarn these days. :D

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

A Couple Small Projects: Hair Clips & a Pillow

In between working on crochet projects, I've finished a few other small things here and there.

This week I organized my girls' hair stuff drawer (yes, a whole drawer - three girls, lots of hair) and I pulled out bows that had been worn till tarnished and dirty and flower clips with flowers falling off and the like.

The flower clips I repaired by adding some extra blossoms (forgive the busy newspaper print underneath the clips):

The dirty bows I pulled off and threw away, and then I hot-glued new flowers onto the still-useful clips (you can see the clip at the far left awaiting its blossoms):
I repaired a couple of headbands (gluing feathers and flowers back on) and then made a little something for me, perfect for sticking into one side of an updo (it's glued to a clear acrylic hair comb, which you can see under the flower if you look closely):

I love how quickly you can make something pretty with hot glue. Before I married my husband, I thought hot glue was fussy and more trouble than it was worth. But . . . I was wrong. He converted me! (Though, I don't think I've ever seen him use it to make hair things . . )

Also, since I had the sewing machine out for a larger project (that's still in process), I whipped up a quick throw pillow using a couple of large, pretty cloth napkins I'd bought on clearance, oh, a year ago? Here it is:

Forgive the bad light (it's been cloudy here), but isn't that embroidery lovely? Since the napkins already had that lovely, thick hemming job on them, I just cut the tags off and then traced the already existent-stitching with my sewing machine to sew the two together, right sides out, left a small hole, stuffed them with fiberfill, and stitched up the opening. Result: pillow!

It was so easy, I want to keep my eyes out for more pretty napkins at Marshall's!

It's nice to have some little things finished in the midst of bigger projects. Gives me the juice to keep going.

Speaking of bigger projects, because I so needed another one, I just started a cardigan in broomstick lace:

Yeah. I'm hopeless. :) Truth is, handiwork, I find, much like exercise and writing, fights the winter blues. Something about the tangible, actual, beauty of it makes me feel that life can't be as bad as I'm sometimes tempted to think. It's as if producing order in the work between the tips of my fingers restores the order in my emotions and my mind. It's a very great gift, work. Praise God for it. Amen.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Links! many, many mostly-unrelated things

I recommend this post by Fred Sanders on Cyrus the Great, which, in addition to explaining why that ancient king is important and providing one more good apology for classical education, includes many interesting quotations from Dorothy Sayers. ("Sayers" = must-read, yes?)
If you, like me, have a secondhand bread machine sans manual, you might find this post from the Hillbilly Housewife as helpful as I did. She goes through - in great and welcome detail - exactly how to use and figure out the quirks of your new-to-you appliance.
If you know who Fitzwilliam Darcy and Mark Darcy are, and if you have seen the Harry Potter films, you just might find this imagined conversation as funny as I did (it had me laughing out loud). (Also, I want to see the movie they're promoting. The trailer looks great.)
Speaking of Harry Potter, I'm pretty sure I need a "Make Love, Not Horcruxes" t-shirt.
I wrote earlier about using coconut oil as a moisturizer. If you want to read more about something similar, check out Kelly's post about using jojoba oil. She adds a "steaming" step to her routine, which sounds interesting.
Here's a neat blog post passed onto me by my sister-in-law called "Liturgy of the Home", comparing the rhythm of the author's home to the liturgy of the church, and looking at a few of the connections between them.
I really like this hairstyle tutorial (I'm wearing my hair this way right now, in fact!). It's quick and easy, but it looks very elegant.
This post, by a mother who has recently lost her son, is amazing and terrible and sad and all about the love of God. I don't have better words to describe it, but go read it. And pray for her and her husband, please.
Emily has a post about making your own bouillon which is intriguing.

I hope this week's links didn't give you too much whiplash! Not many of them are very related, but hopefully they provide you some good reading.
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

my favorite etsy stores

This post is dedicated to my mom, who just discovered Etsy. :)

Here are a list of my favorite Etsy stores, and they are all ones from which I've ordered and been happy, or which are owned by friends of mine, and I've seen their products in person and know they're good businesswomen. I'd love, btw, if you shared some of your favorite Etsy stores in the comments - I always love finding new artists.

Etsy, for those who don't know, is a website where people who make things by hand may sell their wares. So it's like an online mall full of unique, artsy shops. You can also find cool vintage items there.

So, here are my favorites:

-first, my latest find: Just Pure Minerals. They makes mineral makeup, which I've wanted to try for awhile. (I'm not a big makeup person, but sometimes, thanks to hormones, you need the stuff.) This shop lets you, for $2, including shipping, try any four of their colors, and the sample sizes are generous. Plus, when I ordered, they threw in a lip gloss sample too. And all of my samples were very nice and worked well. I think I'm converted.

-next: Hotwired, who's based in New Zealand (gotta love a Kiwi!) and makes nose jewelry. My eye was caught by her Trinity knots, but they looked a little big. However, I got one of these spirals, and one of these tiny twisted gold hoops, and I like both very much.

-This is my go-to store for gifts for loved ones who live out-of-state: Broken Road Farm. She makes baked goods and fudges. Look at her site and try not to drool! She will also include a little card with your gift message on it for free.

-And here is my other go-to store for gifts: SV Soaps. When I ordered a gift from here, she sent me some samples of her soaps to try myself - they smelled delicious and lathered up well, and even though they were sample sizes, I'm still using them up. She also was willing to include a gift message gratis. (Check out her sampler gift set.)

-The items in this store are just pretty: Mary Wibis. I've only bought postcard reproductions of her art, but check out this hand-painted silk scarf. Or this blue jay platter.

-If you want cute, cheap, dangly earrings, you can't go wrong with Thrifty Bunny. I like these teeny pink tulip earrings.

-Duckingham Palace: cute knitted stuff, including dishcloth sets.

-Lullaby Slings: baby slings and mei teis. My kids lived in their slings when they were little.

BONUS SECTION: WISTS

Here are some shops I haven't bought anything from yet, but that I keep looking at, and will probably order from sometime (maybe when I have have birthday money). Alternately, some of these are shops that I look to for inspiration for my own craft projects. 

-Artyard Studio: the blues this man works with! I love the rich, cobalt-colored ceramic pieces in this shop. And some of them look really affordable.

-Timberstone Turnings. This guy makes lathe-turned hairsticks, inlaid with gemstones. They're beautiful. He often doesn't have much in his shop, because his are mostly custom orders that are bought by the intended recipient as soon as they're listed. But you can see lots of his work if you click on his feedback - almost everyone who's bought one of his sticks has posted an appreciation picture of the stick in use in her hair.

-Mairzy Dozy. I find her hair combs inspirational. She has an eye for what pretty things can be done with beads and flowers!

-ChicAllure. More hair stuff. Pretty, pretty, pretty!

So, where do you like to shop on Etsy?

hair toys on Etsy

So, my hair is still growing . . . but it's too short for a lot of the prettier hair toys (which is good, 'cause boy they're expensive!). But I still can't help browsing Etsy and dreaming of someday having the waist length hair needed to do justice to a gorgeous hammered copper chignon or a pair of wicked-looking hair swords like these.

Etsy is just way too much fun. I like it so much better than most online stores, because there's such a variety of interesting things, and because it almost always inspires me to try making something myself, too.

These now, these I could conceivably use. And there are fun things like this that I'd like to try doing myself (thrift-store costume jewelry + superglue + plastic haircomb, I'm guessing). My hair's long enough for a proper Gibson tuck now, and it's fun to have something pretty to stick into the fold of that hair style.

I actually ended up ordering a few decorative combs for the purpose, and now I'm impatiently awaiting them so that I can try them out. I'm also wondering about whittling myself a hair fork. I think I could do it if I got my husband to make the cuts with his saw first. I don't think it would look quite as good as that, but I think it'd be fun to try.

I'm fascinated by the vintage hair toys on Etsy too. This is the stuff women used before they had elastic, you know? And a lot of the stuff can't be used unless you have longer hair. It makes me wonder what they did for little girls, whose hair was still growing. Or women who had been sick. I suppose that's what ribbons and head scarfs were for? You can also find things like Amish hair pins. It's not like this stuff is never used anymore. (Though I'm guessing the ones the Amish actually use aren't decorated like that.)

Anyone else find something lovely on Etsy recently? Or have any experience using hair forks? Are they as easy and pretty as they look?

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

going grey

I just read a long thread in the well-trained mind forums about hair-dying. It was really funny, because most of the responses were something along the lines of "well, I'm fine with others going grey, but I started going grey so early that I had to dye."

Which makes me think that, actually, it's probably pretty normal to start go grey in your twenties. We just don't think it is because there are so few women in our country who don't dye their hair.

I freely admit my bias: I dislike dyed hair. Doesn't make me think horribly of women who do, I just really prefer seeing real hair. I think it's more interesting.

But, whichever side of the (non)debate you fall on, isn't it weird to think that we see so little natural hair that we have no real idea anymore of when people commonly go grey? Or how much of the population actually is blonde? (A much smaller proportion than you'd think if you just go by how much blonde hair you see. Same for redheads.)

I think the funniest story about this I've heard comes from my mother, who has the most gorgeous hair I've ever seen (which, sadly, I didn't inherit). It's a deep gold. Just the loveliest dark blonde, with natural light highlights and red lowlights. And unlike most blondes, it's incredibly thick. (Did I mention that somehow it didn't get passed on to me?)

Okay, actually I like my hair. And with my olive skin, I'd make a really silly blonde. But still. Not fair. (Also not fair? The fact that my brother has long eyelashes and I don't. He's a boy! He doesn't need them!) (Um. Love you, Josh!)

Anyway, one day my mother was standing in line at the grocery store, and a lady waiting with her asked her where she'd had it done. My mom thanked her, but said that it was natural. The lady said, "No, where did you get it done?" "I was born with it." "No, really! Where . . ." The conversation continued along these lines for awhile, my mom insisting she was born with it, until the lady threw a fit and said, "Fine! Don't tell me!"

What's so funny about this story to me is that fake color has become so common in our society, that when someone sees the real thing, she can't believe it isn't fake. If I were a preacher, I'm sure I could get a moral out of that somehow.

My mom's hair is starting to go grey now, though it's hard to see, since the grey blends in with the blonde. My hair is going grey too, and it's easier to see, since I'm dark, although it's still just four or five hairs.

Will I dye my hair as the number increases? I don't know. I don't plan to, but I now you change your mind about things sometimes as you get older.

Though from what I've observed so far about my greys, I think I'd rather have their texture changed than their color! (And I could see dying my hair grey completely if the slow transition gets to be too much of a pain. Honestly, I'm hoping for my great-grandma's beautiful pure white.)

What about you? Do you think it's weird that seeing a grey-haired sixty-year old is less common than seeing a brunette one? Did you (like me) start to go grey in your twenties? Is our idea of what "looking old" is screwed up? Do you like dying your hair, and if so, do you think that fake highlights ever look as good as real ones? I know I'm in the minority on my opinion about how dyed hair looks, so I'm curious about what it looks like from the other side.

And again: no great moral point here, and no hate for those who are on the other side of this. It seems to me mainly about aesthetics. (Though here is a fascinating article about some of the possible sociological effects.) Any thoughts?

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

p.s. Okay, I don't quite hate all dyed hair. I think that dyed hair that is an unnatural color (e.g., purple) is kind of fun. I don't like dyed hair that is trying to look natural, 'cause it's annoying. Dyed hair that's trying to look dyed? I think is kind of awesome. :)

Links:

Amy at A Joyful Journey writes about the living with the loss of her eldest daughter and the hope of Christ in Grief in the Shadows. This is the gospel. Thank you for sharing this, Amy.

For my fellow writers: This Is Your Job.

A post from Matt Kennedy: Why Read the Bible? I especially appreciate his reminder that we all worship something.

The customer's not always right . . . especially when it comes to those new-fangled computers. This is hilarious - thanks for the story, Josh!

And again, thanks to my brother: check out this ceiling covered in beetle carapaces. It's beautiful!

After reading up on growing out my hair, I couldn't help but find this trailer really interesting. I have no authority to speak to the issues this movie is about, but the way culture and personal appearance interact is eye-opening.


Hope you had a good weekend!
peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

crown braid on shoulder-length hair

Kerry asked, so . . . here is what my crown braid looks like from the back (forgive the glare from the flash!):

In this picture, I started the braid over at the right, just above my ear, braided all the way around, counter-clockwise, and ended in a tail that would have stuck a couple inches off the right side of my head. I then pinned that tail up so that it ended at the same spot where I started the braid, which makes it look like a complete circle.
And this is what it looks like from the front:


I'm sorry I don't have a picture of my hair down. It's only down in early in the morning and late at night, and it's usually dark then! But it's about at my shoulders.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

growing your hair long: a few tips

Heather asked what I'd learned about growing out your hair, so I'm writing up the list here. Please note, most of this is stuff I learned puttering around the forums on this site; I'm not an expert at all, so, as always, do your own research first. There's some disagreement about some of this (e.g., are silicone-containing shampoos good or bad?), but this is what I've settled on.

1) Don't cut your hair. As I mentioned in this post, it seems obvious, but it's often overlooked. Most hair-stylists recommend a trim every six weeks or so, but that advice is really for people who want to keep up their current style; six weeks is about how long it takes for a short haircut to lose its shape. If you want long hair, you really don't want to cut it often - you'll cut off all of your growth! (If I'm remembering correctly, an average rate of growth is about six inches a year.) If you're starting without split ends, you can probably get away with trimming about twice a year, and then only a little bit. (If you're starting with split ends, there are other methods.)

2) Change how often you wash your hair. Taking a shower every day is fine, but don't wash your hair every day. It doesn't need the detergents of the shampoo stripping it of its oils all the time. About every three days is good a good balance between getting rid of dirt and keeping your hair from getting too dry.

3) Change how you wash your hair. Some people like to go no-poo, but I like the simplicity of the condition-wash-condition method. The idea behind it is that you really need to wash the hair close to your scalp (that's where all the dead skin gunk is going to be), but the hair that falls past the bottom of your ears doesn't really need to be washed (this is, stripped with detergent). So after you get your hair wet, coat the hair lower than the bottom of your ears with conditioner. Then wash all the hair on your head with shampoo. Then rinse off shampoo and conditioner, and condition all your hair. Let sit and then rinse as normal.

4) Oil your hair. Doesn't that just sound like something out of the Old Testament? Coconut oil is popular, and I ended up finding a little jar of it in the small alternative medicine section of CVS (a section I didn't even know CVS had!) for about a buck fifty. You only need a teeny-tiny amount - about the scrape of a fingernail if you have air-conditioning and about a dip of the fingertip if you don't. Rub it between your palms (your palms will only barely be shiny if you have the right amount) and then palm it gently onto your hair, stroking down. Only put it on the hair past your ears; your scalp hair will get oily enough on it's own! This is basically for moisture; you don't really want enough to show, although it will make your hair a bit shinier, which is nice. Do this when your hair is dry, btw. (Again, some people think oiling makes things worse - do your own research and experiments. What works seems to depend on your hair type.)

5) Treat your hair gently. By the time it gets down to your waist, your hair is four or five years old, probably. It's fragile. Don't always pull it up in the same hairdo, stressing the same spots over and over. Don't tear things out of your hair: pull rubberbands out gently (and make them those nice, fabric-coated, no-seam rubberbands) and separate the tines of your bobby-pins before you pull them out, so you don't rip your hair while you're doing it. If possible, find a wood or horn detangling comb for detangling your hair; plastic combs all have sharp little seams up the edges of the teeth from the molds they were made it, and combing these through your hair is kind of like running curling ribbon over the edge of a scissors blade. Many people will advise not using bobby pins or rubberbands at all, and just going with hairsticks, but I like having my hair up in braids too much to do that.


Speaking of braids, check out this post to see what's possible with shoulder-length hair! I love, love, love my hair this way, and since I can do it both directions, it's not getting stressed the same way every day.

I hope this helps. There is seriously lots, lots, lots more over on the boards I linked to at the top of this post, including advice for folks once their hair is longer than mine is now, but I'm not including that because I have no experience with it yet!

To end on a hopeful note: most folks over there seem to think that just about everyone can grow long hair. Some people have special genes so that their individual hairs don't fall out after six or seven years, and they're the ones who can walk around with hair down to their ankles. But most people have a growth rate that will let their hair get down about to the bottom of their bottoms, if it's well-cared for. I'm really curious to see if this is true, because my prior experience is that my hair would grow to my mid-back and then stop. But it was full of split ends when it was that long, so I can see how it'd be possible that it could get longer if I can keep it undamaged.

Anyway, Heather, there's your list! Thanks for asking, it was fun to write.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

look for me, baby

It's been a bit more than a month since my old computer died, but now I'm all set up on a spiffy little (and I mean little) new one. I love it; I've christened it Baby Ivan.

The past month has been full of good things, and a lot of them, I think, have been helped by being offline. There's been more breathing room in life, and in that time, I've:

-got our homeschool organized and started
-got some peace about having to leave our old church
-finish plotting my next novel (so excited about this one!)
-start a new housework routine
-thought about how I need to change how I use my computer
-read lots of books (reviews upcoming)
-learn how to care for long hair

Yes, the last one is a little weird, but doing the research was fun. I've been growing my hair out for a year now, and I thought that since I was planning on continuing, I ought to find out how to do it properly. Most interesting tip I found? That long hair ought to be treated as if it were old lace. Why? Because if your hair is very long at all, it's also very old, and so it's got to be treated gently or it will fall apart (i.e., start to split).

Most practical tip? Um, don't cut it. No, honestly, that's apparently what most people get wrong. They're always told to trim ever 6-8 weeks, but if you do that, you're probably cutting most, if not all, of your growth. The truth is, if your hair is healthy, you don't have to trim it more than about every six months.

Huh. I didn't think my first blog back would be talking about hair. But, there you go. I can braid it all the way around my head now, and I'm very happy about that.

Anyway, I missed you all. Though I've kept up on reading blogs (and so many of you are so encouraging), I've missed being part of the conversation. I'm looking forward to sharing more books, and homeschool plans, and kid stories, and church year celebrations, and novelist adventures as the year (finally! I hope!) slips out of summer and into the glorious, crisp, lovely clean air of fall.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

p.s. the title of this post refers to a song by Fiction Family. It's good. Buy it on iTunes. :)

not that we're supposed to spend tons of time on our hair and clothes . . .

. . . after all, St. Peter's pretty clear about that.

But you do have to wear clothes. (A little girl at my church once made this very clear to me. "Good morning," I said to her, when I met her on the church steps. She looked at me very solemnly, and returned my greeting by saying: "We MUST wear clothes." "Yes," I agreed, "we must." Her dad, standing behind her, explained, "She wanted to wear a swimsuit to church today. We explained that she couldn't." "Ah," I said.) And you do have to keep your hair out of your face.

Anyway, there's a lady at my church who wears salwar kameez every now and then, and looks stunning in them. I complimented her on the bright red one recently, and she explained that she finds them on eBay. Well, I had a bit of discretionary money, so I looked on eBay, and found some, but was then very distracted by the saris. Ooooh, saris.

So I ordered a couple of cotton saris. I already have a very fancy silk one, which I've never worn, since I didn't have a shirt to go with it. Discovered in my eBay searches that most saris "come with blouse" which means that on the end of the long sari is a panel of fabric that you're supposed to cut off and sew into a blouse yourself. Found out my lovely silk sari did indeed have such a panel, and even had a sticker on it that said, "comes with blouse". Yep. So I cut off the panel, and I'm planning on sewing it up sometime after I finish my sister's birthday dress. (Um, I'm sewing my sister a Jane Austen-style dress for her birthday. There's a ball she wants to go to.)

Anyway, I ordered a couple of cotton saris. I figure if they work well in India, they'll probably be perfect summer-weather-wear in SoCal. And since I am so very white, I'll just wear a tank-top under them till I manage to make the requisite blouses. I hope no one is offended at a non-Indian wearing saris - they're just so beautiful, and seem so very sensible. I'm going with imitation being the sincerest form of flattery on this one.

I told my husband, "Instead of being the homeschool mom who wears jumpers, I'm gonna be the homeschool mom who wears saris."


So that's the clothes. Now, the hair. After chopping my hair off last summer, in desperation over heat and twinfants, it's finally long enough to braid again (yay!). I love braids, because I can do them once, in the morning, and then my hair stays put all day long. Plus, pretty! I like braiding my hair in a crown, and I can do a modified version of that at this point, so I'm happy. It's easy to tie a scarf over too, if I want to.

But what I'm really waiting for is hair long enough to do this:


Wow. Check out the rest of her videos too. I love it!

Okay, so there's the vanity post for, I hope, the year. Braids and saris. That's my plan for beating the heat this summer.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

DIY: Button-Embellished Bobby Pins

I'm sure you've seen pricey embellished bobby-pins in stores. And you might have even thought, I bet I can do that.

Well, I'm here to tell you, yes you can.

I'm not sure why we have a hot-glue gun in our house, but I'm certain that it was my husband, and not I, who brought it into our marriage. Because I'm pretty sure this was my first attempt at crafting using a hot glue gun:

And here's a shot of the back, to show you how easy it was:

A few buttons, a few bobby pins. Slide the button of your choice onto the bobby pin, and then put a dab of hot glue on there to make sure it stays in place. That's it. If you want to get fancy, slide the bobby pin onto some cardstock or wax paper first, so the hot glue doesn't glue it closed. If you're me, risk burning your fingers by holding the bobby pin apart while the glue dries (no, wait, don't do that!).

I'm so psyched at how well these turned out! If you try it, I hope you have as much fun as I did.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell