Love and Duty

Love and Duty

"Karen, please give a short and simple definition of Mother Culture," was the request on Facebook. Wishing to accommodate I typed away. Then I worked to cut it down quite a bit.

     To me Mother Culture is a mingling of love and duty. It is the skillful art of a mother looking after the ways of her household and herself. With a heart of devotion, she seeks to find happiness in those things she "has" to do, as well as whatever she might set her hand to do to express her creativity.
     Greatly helped by an understanding of the educational method of Miss Charlotte Mason, she is a home teacher who learns how to cultivate the souls of her children and herself while she is free to not be too exhausted for her husband's company.
     So nourished and refreshed with ideas, she keeps growing closer to God and into the Christian woman God is designing her to be.

I hope this definition helps you introduce Mother Culture new home teachers in your circle of acquaintances.

In the Works 
Nigel finished the cover of Mother Culture - for a Happy Homeschool (above). If it is difficult to tell whether he used water color or oil paint it is because he used neither. Using his large wacom tablet and wacom pen as a paint brush, he worked meticulously on my front and back covers for a good many days. It is a skill he taught himself. By a kind of trial and error he designs his own paint brush tools to accomplish the strokes he needs to get the look he imagines. "Necessity is the mother of invention," said Aesop.

One morning he said, “I have a surprise for you. I added something to the picture.”

“Really? What?” I questioned.

“Take a look,” he said.

He had painted my purple book, A Charlotte Mason Companion, on top of the pile of books he had placed within easy reach of the mother. 

Fabric 
As you know, fabric makes me smile. In between daily chores I enjoyed making a pint size "courthouse steps" inspired by Kathleen's Tracy's Small & Scrappy. Using the 4" Log Cabin Trim Tool by Jean Ann Wright, my piecing turned out less wonky. With this plastic ruler you trim after you piece each new pair of strips in a continual sort of "squaring-up" of the block as it grows. You end up with a pile of scraps,which in olden days would have stuffed a toy. I watched a YouTube tutorial about how to use it.

I placed this little quilt on my tea table to photograph it, while I was drinking a watermelon-strawberry-orange smoothie, and decided to make the quilt its table top for awhile. Some "wonky" is still in evidence but I tell myself this is part of the charm of something handmade.

I hand-quilted in-the-ditch with blue thread and added a scalloped edge to put some "round" in the design.

Wild Flowers
Walking back from the mailbox early in May I was pleased to see that a wild azalea (rhododendron prinopyllum) was blooming in our Pennsylvania woods again, this year with more blooms than last. I found a second bush on the other side of our property. I only know its name because I identified it (the old fashioned way) with my field guide some years back. I've managed unscathed, to keep the prolific poison ivy off both wild azalea bushes.

At an antique store two little out-of-print books caught my eye: First Delights - A Book About the Five Senses by Tasha Tudor (pub.1966) - a well-read library discard - and And It Was So by W. L. Jenkins of Westminster Press (based on Scripture) illustrated by Tasha Tudor in 1958. One is for Sophia and Andrew's children. 

The other is for Yolanda and Daniel's little girl on the way.

Speaking about babies on the way. I collected fabric for a "pink lemonade" crib quilt. As this quilt has a thicker batting than what I usually use in my doll quilts I quilted it with a walking foot on machine. I will show you my photograph after the baby shower as Yolanda reads this blog and I want to keep the finished quilt a surprise.

In April I spent a week with my parents in New Jersey. Then one of my children had surgery and I tried to be supportive.

And yet, since last November, rarely a week has gone by that I wasn't either contemplating, writing, or re-writing, my book.

A Family Affair
For the book, my husband Dean spent weeks scanning choice pictures from our collection of antique books. His computer died and he had to take it to a computer fix-it place to recover the scans. My daughter Sophia wrote the Foreword in the middle of a major household move. Nigel has started the lay-out.

The Calendar
The calendar I wrote for Simply Charlotte Mason titled Hope for Tomorrow is for sale.

This spring Sonya Shaffer wrote an inspiring blog article, "8 Reasons to do Nature Study" that I enjoyed reading.

SCM is planning to carry Mother Culture. I feel honored and encouraged.


Learning Styles
In March I re-wrote (and polished up) my article "Learning Styles and Charlotte Mason" for the blog Charlotte Mason Poetry. You will find a wealth of topics there.


Garden Flowers
In early May (in between all our rain) I enjoyed surrounding the front lamp post with pink zinnia. I can highly recommend keeping up with any physical therapy home assignments. If it wasn't for PT I would not have the joy of using a shovel again, kneeling on my garden mat and getting up again even with curious bees whirling around and buzzing in my ears.

You can see in the foreground how our hungry wild rabbits like our crocus, nibbling leaves in a series of "meals" until they are chewed down to the root. I try not to mind because somehow the crocus always manages to bloom each spring.


Reading
I think I did more reading this year so far than I've ever done. I hope to share highlights of some of these books in upcoming blog posts.

Links
Kathleen's Tracy's Small & Scrappy

Log Cabin Trim Tool by Jean Ann Wright

My article on Charlotte Mason Poetry

2018-2019 Hope for Tomorrow Calendar Journal for Simply Charlotte Mason

Sonya Shaffer's "8 Reasons to do Nature Study."

Keeping in touch,
Karen Andreola