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To eat as well

When my Dad and brother and I used to deer hunt, we would bring venison home. It’s the best meat I’ve ever tasted that wasn’t cured. A specific, natural taste you don’t find anywhere else. And people call it “gamy”; write articles on how to cover it up or disguise it.

I’ve always thought it tasted something like blood. A reminder of where we got it.

A reminder that God created animals as miracles of engineering, muscle and bone and tendons connecting. That God created animals and declared them “good” (Genesis 1:25).

A reminder that God slaughtered an animal to clothe His children, when we disobeyed Him and discovered shame (3:21).

A reminder that when the world was cursed because of us, and became thorny and hostile, and we could only grow food by labor and sweat (3:17-19). . . that then God gave us flesh to eat as well (9:2-3).

That when the Law was too hard for us, when we failed at perfection, Jesus said instead, “this is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19).

Costuming: Why it isn’t as complicated as you think

Hey, y’all!  I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you guys about this.  I’m working on finding a date in June.  In the meantime, I decided to do a post about simple costume ideas.  Because they’re really not that hard.

Stories teach better than anything, so I thought I would simply share a few costumes I’ve made, starting with this one:

Spencer happened to have the three-cornered hat laying around, my grandma gave me the shirt, and I happened to already own a simple skirt.  So I just randomly ended up with the pieces for a simple costume, without even really trying.  Not hard.  (If you don’t have an older brother to get hats for you, I’m very sorry.)

Next, what Spencer and I wore to a Lord of the Rings themed English country dance*:

*Yes, that’s a thing.  And in case you were wondering, it was super fun!

Can you tell who we are?  Most people at the dance recognized us. 🙂

The idea of finding a Middle Earth costume for both of us was daunting at first, but it wasn’t actually that hard.  Both our shoes and most of our clothes are just carefully selected from our closets.  My cardigan was borrowed from Becca, the elf-ears were borrowed from a friend, I happened to have Spencer’s necklace already but you can buy one on amazon.com, and my crown (the only piece we bought specifically for the dance) is just a plastic one we ordered, probably also from Amazon.  It was rather expensive for a plastic crown, but it was the only money we had to spend and we could have gotten a cheaper one if we had gotten on it sooner. 😉

Spencer’s cloak might be a bit of an elephant in the room, and yes, that part was complicated.  That cloak is one of my favorite creations, and the result of a summer-long project, almost a hundred dollars spent on fabric, and lots of help from Mom (and I mean lots, because I have almost no experience sewing).  If you’re not a seamstress or don’t want to buy that much fabric, etc., (back to Amazon) I know there are plenty of hooded cloaks available there too if you look.  Most of them looked thinner and not super high quality, but they weren’t expensive and would work fine for a costume.  We bought one for Lucy for under $20 dollars, and it’s worked well for her and is quite lovely.

Sure, people could probably tell Spencer was in brown dress shoes, and I had a T-shirt on under the cardigan.  But you know what?  It doesn’t have to be perfect.  Like I said earlier, most of the people at the dance knew who we were, and we had fun.  There’s no right or wrong answer.

This is a simpler example (I’m sorry the picture’s poor quality):

Once again, just random things from my closet, but it reminded me of one of Sleeping Beauty’s first costumes in the Disney movie:

I’ve thought about adding my cloak to it, but you could really just use any nice piece of fabric and wear it like a shawl.  And a black headband wouldn’t be hard to find.  It doesn’t look exactly like the movie, but I’d say it’s close enough for me. 😉

In one of her blog posts about building characters, Savannah Grace talked about certain characters having “trademarks”.  She was talking about writing, but when you’re making a costume for a certain character, it can be helpful to think about what “physical trademarks” that character has.  Savannah’s example of Princess Leia’s hair was a good one.  Elsa’s hair is another: all you need is something blue and sparkly and a braid pulled over your shoulder and everyone will know who you’re trying to be.  Arwen/Aragorn’s Evenstar necklace is another example.  So is Jyn Erso’s necklace.

All you really need is a good “trademark” or one quality piece of fan-gear, and it’s easy to go from there.  Or (like in the Sleeping Beauty case) sometimes you don’t even need that.  Like I said, it’s not complicated.

What are simple costumes you’ve made?  What other neat character trademarks did I miss?

Pages

Hey, readers!

We’re going to forego the book review this time, because I’m a bit busy today and I have something else to post about:

I have different pages now, top right!  From now on, I’m going to have links to all my stories on the “My Stories” page, and no longer tag them with their title.  The tags in my tag cloud (to the left) will be posts about the story, not the story itself.  Also, I made a little announcement, at the bottom of the stories page, go check it out!  I’m planning on releasing more information around the beginning of August.

That’s all for now, folks.  I’ll try and get a review up next week.

Happy Tuesday!