Sunday, July 29, 2007

"Nothing" at Granite Tors
















My husband has been gone for a few days on a hike with a friend. Jake showcased his photos last night and I remembered an in-joke from Company... I don't remember how this started exactly except that Jon Polk was involved.
We did a LOT of van travel across Texas and the surrounding states and there's a lot of fairly flat land involved. (slight understatement!) We'd get somewhere outside of a town and someone would say something along the lines of 'There's nothing here!" And I'd respond with a critique of the visible land- something along the lines of "Look! There's power lines, a fence, lines painted on the road, a road sign... There's a barn and cows! That's not 'nothing'!"
So, I thought I'd offer some pictures of 'nothing'... Jake and our friend, Patrick, were gone for 2 nights and 3 days to a hiking trail at Granite Tors. The fun thing about the trailhead for this hike is that it's only about an hour from Fairbanks. The trail itself is about 15 miles and Jake loved it. He's sore, sun-burnt and exhausted but had a wonderful time climbing every one of the tors he could get up and seeing more of Alaska.
The most amazing 'nothing' I've ever seen is through the Yukon Territory- Wish I could share some of those pictures! I might be able to find some from our trip two summers ago...
Anyway, Canada is just smashingly beautiful, and through the Yukon, in particular, you could drive for almost an entire day and not see another car, much less power lines or painted lines. I'll admit that during this last trip I was surprised at how much 'civilization' had encroached on this area. The Yukon gets biting cold and nasty winds during the winter, and is not friendly to humans. It shocks me that anyone would choose to live there. (Okay, I'm sure there are many out there who would say the same about Fairbanks... ;) However, we're talking -80's plus wind chill... We only get -60's for a couple weeks, while they can get those freezing temps for months... (Tee-hee! ;) Yes, I'm defending myself. Okay, who thinks it's a wonderful thing to be anywhere at below 0 degrees?)
Every time I've driven through they've torn up another section of road and are repairing the weather damage. Freezing cold and permafrost is HARD on concrete and as of yet we haven't really figured out a way to create roads that don't sink, pit, split or heave. That's true of Fairbanks, too, but it just doesn't seem to be as bad here... Probably 'cuz we don't have as much permafrost underlying everything...
Back to the 'nothing'... Through much of the Alcan highway you can drive for hours and hours without seeing signs of humanity except for the concrete you're on... I've seen bears, moose, fox, & rabbits right up next to the road. The road is really no different to them than the surrounding area. In fact, this last trip I discovered that almost the entire highway is now paved- I think I remember that we went over about four 5-20 mile stretches of gravel. When my family drove me down to start seminary in '95, we went over at least an entire day of gravel roads, probably more...
An odd part of me craves those drives... Craves endless days of driving through 'nothing' in my little traveling bubble of civilization. Yes, we'd get on each other's nerves, but we also got closer as we'd be required to get along through whatever we'd deal with on the way.
For example:
This last trip we got a flat tire through a nasty little stretch of gravel. Jake started changing the tire, so everyone else hopped out to help and to stretch their legs... Within five minutes we were COMPLETELY inundated/swarmed with mosquitoes. I don't know if I can adequately express how bad or crazy it was. Everybody who could (my mom, my sister, Deborah and a very pregnant me) got back in the car and then had to squash the more than 20 mosquitoes that had gotten in the car during our few minutes of walking. It was insane! Jake started kind of talking/muttering/swearing to himself about the mosquitoes so I got back out and tried to wave them away from him and me while he finished changing the tire... Each of us had huge patches of bites and I suspect that the car still bears some of the squashed bodies from that stop.
There's a local 'myth/urban legend' that mosquitoes can swarm and kill a moose that gets into a marshy area... I don't know if that's true or not, but I can attest to their power to drive someone mad enough to start shooting at them and then shooting off their own foot in the general craziness... Of course, our mosquito tire-changing story has ended up as part of our family language and can be used to express an overwhelming situation or a being driven mad by a stream of tiny details. This event brought us closer because we succeeded in defeating the mosquitoes...
It's easy to forget how big Alaska is and how much 'nothing' surrounds us. Alaska stretches the length between Washington and Florida and is bigger than three Texas' together... Most of it cannot be accessed by car. During our time in Kotzebue the only ways to get out were plane, dog-sled, or snow-machine... Miles and miles of 'nothing'... Not even a gravel road...
I love 'nothing'! I love how beautiful it is. I love how it brings a family or a group of friends closer together as you drive through it and overcome it's challenges. And I love losing myself in it... I love escaping the tediousness of my schedule and the daily necesseties of life at home. I love looking back at the memories of my time there.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Bad Knees & Diabetes


My Mom and the girls
(it's almost impossible to find a good picture of my mom- don't know why... She just always looks like she's been caught, even if she's smiling. oh, well.)
My mom had a total knee replacement surgery today. I just heard from the doctor that it went very well. YAY! Thank you, God!

We've all been very nervous about the whole thing, as you can imagine. So many complications for her- diabetes, pacemaker, nerve damage from her diabetes, arthritis... We're all hoping that at least some of her problems will be minimized with this surgery- She'll be walking along or standing in the line at the grocery store and her legs just go totally numb. Then she can barely just get somewhere to sit down without falling. So far, she hasn't fallen anywhere outside, but she has fallen at home. She avoids going anywhere in the winter 'cuz the ground gets so slippery here and we're all worried about her having a really bad fall on the ice... Scarey.

We couldn't figure out what on earth was going on at first. I was absolutely convinced something was pushing on her spinal cord, and they couldn't do an MRI 'cuz of her pacemaker. Anyway, I've had it repeatedly confirmed that yes, that kind of numbness and weird nerve pain can be caused by diabetes. So, if you've got diabetes, keep it under control! If you let it get out of control it can get BAD. You might die, yes, but sometimes the ramifications of living with diabetes damage are almost worse than dying...

Anyway, almost all of Mom's pain is related to her bad knees, so this surgery should help with most of her pain. At least, that's the hope... We'll see. The recovery time for this kind of surgery is crazy... A LONG time... You have to completely learn how to walk again.

I am reminded that it's been a little more than a year since my mom had her stroke, which is amazing to me... Her recovery has been shockingly good. The only long term effects she's had to deal with are a loss of strength in her arms & some difficulty in reaching the very top shelves in the kitchen. Amazing. It could have been much worse. Thank you, God, for a mild stroke!

God, thank you for my mom. She is my friend and a good mom, and a wonderful grammy. God, please let the recovery process be smooth. Please help her with the pain. She's been in so much pain, and has had a lot of difficulty getting around. Please let this make her life easier and less complicated. Please let this give her more freedom. Bless her, God. She has been such an amazing gift from you. Thank you that the surgery part is over!

Sunday, July 22, 2007

DSL

My mom finally got talked into exchanging our dial-up connection for DSL! Yay! Best part: We weren't the ones that talked her into it!!

We've been contributing the money for the dial-up connection, so it's not really a change in money. She just wasn't convinced it was a need and the phone is in her name.

But the guys from our phone company talked to her and explained that the phone line wouldn't be busy while we're on. (which we had said, but it's different from someone else...) And talked to her about some of the benefits of DSL and finally she decided it would be a much better option for our family. Yay!!!

So, the result is- I can zoom around! It takes me about 30 seconds to up-load a picture vs. the 10 minutes it had been taking. Check my email in 10 minutes... Check my friend's blogs... Check the news... Watch video clips as they're coming in vs. downloading them for FOREVER and then discovering it didn't work...

You all probably already know the joys of DSL, so I shall not elaborate much. Just let you know that for the last year I've been languishing in dial-up land, and now I'm soaring in DSLand!! Yay for me!

My garden


Here's a bit of my garden from this summer... I've been working on it when I have time, mostly in the evenings before beading. The lovely tall blue flowers are Chinese Delphinium that Beth planted back about 10 years ago. I like them but they are completely taking over everything! They're sprouting up in our yard, and I actually moved about 30 of them this year. I planted them in this rocky area that our previous owners had created right up around the house. It's very silty/sandy there, and they've done so well everywhere else I figure they're probably the only flower that'll survive in there. We'll see... They're looking pretty sad right now.
Much as I like the delphiniums, I also like other flowers. I was able to make room for some smaller flowers... My eye has been craving yellow so I've been finding and planting yellow poppies and yellow violas. I hope they come back after the winter!
Last summer or the one before my friend April helped me transplant two irises, and this year I got brave and transplanted three more. The yellowy-brown right next to the tree is one of them. Right now all three of them are wilty, but I think/hope they'll make it. The two she did are beautiful now, so I'll just have to wait and see...

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Half-Truths

Satan wants to do anything he can to keep people blinded to the truth and lost. He knows all of us are created with a longing for God that we often confuse with a longing for anything ‘spiritual.’

The good news of Jesus Christ was running rampant all over the Middle Eastern part of the world in John’s day and heading north, south, east and west. Jesus was a hot topic of conversation. Once Satan established that he couldn’t squelch spiritual hunger or stop the talk about Christ, he determined to supply a new story that made best use of both. He suggested through false teachers that Christ indeed came but not in the flesh. Therefore, the spiritually hungry could still have a belief system involving God but remain, as my relatives would say, as lost as a goose. Why? Because our access to God is through the torn flesh of Jesus Christ. To deny the incarnation is to deny the one and only means of salvation.

I imagine your know someone at work or elsewhere that may be very ‘spiritual’ but doesn’t believe in the incarnate death of Christ as the means to salvation. Do you see what Satan has done? He has tried to feed their need for the spiritual and still keep them blind to the truth. Clever and terribly destructive, isn’t he?
Don’t judge them. Pray like mad for them! Pray for the veil to be removed and the torn veil of Jesus’ flesh to be made clear! Pray as well for those who teach such false doctrines.

Quoted from The Beloved Disciple by Beth Moore
***
After reading this chapter in Moore's book, I was reminded of one of my students. I want to share her story…

One of the things I LOVED about Chrysalis was getting to work one on one with my high school English students. I’d see each of my English students for one hour a week (sometimes two half hour segments, sometimes a one hour segment) and we’d go over their work, talk about what they were reading, check their homework together and then go over their assignment for next week. (By the way, it’s a FANTASTIC way to make sure a student who is struggling gets the help they need, or a student who is excelling gets to move at their own pace…)

Anyway, I had this one student, (I’ll call her Christy, that's not her name) a 16-17 year old young woman who excelled in the sciences and mathematics- was doing trig/calculus with the math teachers. Christy had written a lot of research papers and wanted to work on some literary stuff, so we had a lot of fun working on poetry, some short stories and her reports on the novel she was reading. I thoroughly enjoyed her! Christy was bright, funny, intelligent and did good work. Not highly imaginative, but solid a+b=c type writing. In the process of reading some of our books together, and through some of her more journal-type writings, I found out she was a Christian....

It wasn’t until January or so that I finally found out that her ‘version’ of Christianity included a Christ who was just a ‘good man’, not divine… She brought in one of her research papers and let me read it and I was way weirded out… Don't get me wrong. I didn't flip out on her or anything, but I did talk with her about what exactly she meant by a couple things, and a running theological conversation became part of our meetings. I wanted to understand what she believed and witness to her about the truth. I think she wanted to 'save' me from the 'lies' I'd been fed, much as I wanted to see Jesus save her...

The more I learned about her ‘Christianity’ the more freaky it got. Christy’s dad was a pastor who’d dropped out of a major denomination- I want to say Methodist, but I really don’t remember exactly which one it was. He’d started a home church, which was basically her family and a couple others and they met on Sundays and he taught. His lessons included that Jesus had historically been lied about since the days of the early church, that he wasn’t divine and that the church fathers had just cooked that up to keep control of the masses. There was more half-truth involved, but those are the major points of his doctrine.

I had some answers for some of her contentions, but I’m not a good apologetics person… I tend to go completely blank and I can never remember anything I’ve studied or memorized. Most of the time I find that arguing about something doesn’t really change anybody’s mind and it gets us both upset in the process. Christy was SOLIDLY grounded in her dad’s belief system and had answers for my probing questions. In fact, while I wasn’t shaken in my faith by any of her beliefs, I was taken aback by some of the bizarre historical things her dad had cooked up… And it was her dad! Have you ever tried to talk with someone who’s DAD is the false prophet when they agree with him? Very hard to convince them that he’s not right…

I didn’t teach at a Christian school or even a public school. We had guidelines for how we were to conduct ourselves in matters of personal belief… (I actually agreed with those guidelines, too.) We never went over those lines, but I know that I ended up making her think about some of the things her dad said about Jesus… And her half-true/ half-false beliefs had me remembering exactly what it is I do belief about Jesus and his role in salvation. I guess that’s all God had in store for me in our relationship. Maybe I planted some seeds in there... I don't know. I do know that there was no way I was gonna persuade her about Jesus’ divinity…

And then I got put on bed rest at the beginning of March and wasn’t allowed to go back to school to finish out the semester… So, no other conversations came up and no other truths were shared…

She has haunted me since then… I have prayed about her, wished that I could go back and say something stronger- have the magic tongue of Paul and convince her of Jesus’ love and divinity and truth… I want to know that the truth of who He is pierced her heart… I want to know that she came to know Jesus truthfully and accurately. I want to know that she’ll be in heaven with me. I want to know that I did the best job I could with the time I had with her…

God, you know Christy and you love her way more than I do… You know her dad and whatever happened to him that caused him to lose his way. I don’t know if he ever believed in you- if he ever had a full grasp of the truth. Please reach her. Really, regardless of what I said or did, you are the only one who can pierce her heart with the truth and take the blinders off her eyes. Oh, Jesus, reveal who you are to her! How amazing your divine love is... Jesus, the amazing sacrifice you made for us really becomes the heart of Christianity because you are God’s son… That you alone could do that- that you alone are perfect- that you alone were sinless- that you alone saw the dawn of creation, saw your mother’s eyes on the day you were born and then looked at the faces of the crowd as they crucified you… Christy needs you. She needs the lies to be ripped away and replaced with your truth. She needs your love to reach past her logic... Reach her, Jesus…

Friday, July 13, 2007

My Garden

I've finally been able to putter about my flower garden and make some changes. I love gardening- one of those weird things I didn't know about myself until I finally got to try it. I don't know how to explain the contentment I get from digging and planting and watering and planning... I like getting my hands in the dirt!

Right now I'm not doing any veggies, just flowers. We're overrun with delphiniums, so I've been digging 'em up, moving them around and planting some other stuff- poppies, daisies and johnny-jump-ups... I have some long term plans with the whole thing and I'm enjoying it so much. :) In the past I've spent a lot of time, money and effort on annuals and then they're gone! So this year I've really focused on perennials- stuff that'll make it through the winter.

Here's an odd fact about Fairbanks: if we don't get enough snow on the ground to protect the plants from the cold, they'll die... Weird, huh? Doesn't quite sound right. The snow insulates the plants and their roots from the bitter cold (-40's or -50's), so if we get a low snow year, we lose a lot of our plants. A few years ago, I lost a bunch of daisies from a low snow year. I'm learning some different ways of protecting them so that they come back. We'll see what happens when I'm all done, and next summer.

God is LIGHT

“God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all.” 1 John 1:5
I can hardly wait to tell you what that statement means to me. God has no dark side. Hear that! Absorb it to your marrow! No matter how many theological questions remain unanswered to you, of this you can be sure: God has no dark side at all!! You see, that’s why He can purify all of us no matter how dark our sides have been. He is utterly, perfectly pure. Oh, don’t you just want to stop right now and tell Him how much you love Him? Do you see that His total lack of darkness is also why you can trust Him? He is incapable of having an impure motive where you are concerned.

Quoted from The Beloved Disciple by Beth Moore
*****
I'd never thought of it like that. Yes, I know I can trust God's intentions towards me, but I don't always... Sometimes, a frustrating/annoying/scared little part of me thinks that God really is putting me through something just to "see what'll happen". I KNOW that's not true, but part of me tends to not trust His motives. I wish I did. I KNOW better. My unbelief in His goodness and love hinders my ability to grow in Him, and hinders His ability to work in my life. But I still don't trust Him fully... But, I do trust Him more than I did 5 years ago. And I trust Him more than I did 10 years ago. So, I know I'm growing. But growing hurts sometimes...

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Chandelier Earring Project


So, last night I got to playing with my beads and ended up finishing a project for myself, which has become rather rare...
And here it is. One of those beading projects that absolutely exemplifies what I love about beading-
First, the beads cost in the $10-$12 range (which means high end Swarovski crystals and components, although I admit I've reached the point where I buy large quantities from on-line catalogues, and I'm not counting my tools. Still the average Josephina off the street could probably make it for about $15-$16. The most expensive piece is the chandelier that the beads are hung from.)
Second, from design concept to wearing my project took about 45 minutes.
Third, if I were to sell this I'd probably make $25-$30.
Fourth, (and really most important!) I think it's pretty. (you don't have to, I won't kill you. Just don't tell me! :)
I love beads! They're pretty, and really you can get something very nice for a suprisingly small amount of money. Yes, I'm addicted. It's okay. I'm making money! (well, not a lot. Not even enough to pay for my addiction. But we are slowly making more and more at it.)
In the last year, I've finally reached a point where I say that I'm collecting beads and I pretty much buy what I like (if I have the money). I used to just buy stuff for a project and then save the leftovers. Things change... Now I've got bags and bags of beads! Yay! It's a good thing I like 'em, and that my husband fully supports this endeavor. I'm sure he wonders what on earth is going to eventually happen to all my stock, but he has been incredibly wonderful during this slowly growing business.

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Satisfaction in God, Part 2

My sister and I have been having a running email conversation about finding satisfaction in God, and I feel like I hit on something that's pretty important to me. I suspect that many people have got this down, or at least understand it while I'm still floundering around...

I know this is something Paul speaks to in Philipians 3:8-10. In this passage Paul talks about finding nothing else equal to the greatness of knowing Christ, and that Christ alone brings satisfaction and completeness. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. This is one of my very favorite passages, but I've never looked at it quite like this before... I've always focused on the idea of "Knowing Christ", becoming like Him and the value & joy of my relationship with Him...

I hadn't really ever thought about my disatisfaction with life being related to my need for God... I have been so unsatisfied/frustrated/angry lately with the life Jake & I are living right now... Being stuck at home all day, having very little money, being bored and unhappy with my 'homemaker' status... I've been dreaming of moving to Washington or Oregon or even just into our own place here in Fairbanks. And I've been dreaming about getting at least a part-time job, maybe even a full time job just so that we'd have a little more money. Things are so tight right now, and I keep thinking that something/anything would change the way that I feel about our situation... (even though I'm very sure that staying at home with my girls is where God wants me right now)

I guess I've been thinking that if I had a job I'd be satisfied..., or if Jake & I had our own place I'd be satisfied. Wow. That's so wrong. If my unsatisfied feelings are all about needing to be closer to God, then it really doesn't matter if I'm here, in Texas or in Seattle... It will only be satisfied by the time I spend with God. I will only find joy and completion in knowing Christ more fully and resting in Him.

I've always taken so much satisfaction and maybe even my identity from the work I've done for God... I think it's quite possible that's the reason God doesn't have me working in a church right now. I think that God has separated me from my busy-ness to remind me that the reason I am called to serve is to find myself completely in Him. Finding my person in bringing Him glory... Finding satisfaction in lifting Him up, and allowing Him to fill every hole in me- The holes I try to fill with books, places, escape, acting, and music...

God, help. I want you to fill me and make me complete. I've got so many soul-holes that I have tried to fill with things other than You. And they will never satisfy. I want Your fullness and Your completion. I want more of You...

Our backyard in July


Green, green, green!
Plus a couple kid's toys...

Sunday, July 01, 2007

June books

First Truth, and Hidden Truth by Dawn Cook B+
Good fantasy books. Liked them very much. Fun characters and an interesting situation. Wish I could find the third book!!

The Husband by Dean Koontz B+
Good. Not his best. Interesting story.

Forbidden City by Alex Archer C
From the Rogue Angel series, which I didn’t know until I’d gotten a chapter in… A good adventure, but lousy writing… Had an interesting idea, just really cliché and bland.

Touch the Dark by Karen Chance D-
Okay, I admit I only got a third of the way through the book and quit… Too much telling and not enough story, which I find Very Annoying. Also, rather dark, dark, dark… Beth loves vampire books and recommends them to me frequently, and in general, I’m just not into them. Some of them are good, but this is not one of them.

Mirror Dance, Memory, Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold A-
Loved these… Excellent stories, characters… They are mystery/sci-fi/adventure/space opera tales following Miles Vorkosigan. It was interesting to reread these again. I’m amazed at how much is going on in these books. Each of them is so thick with multiple stories and happenings that I must have missed a quarter of everything the first time around. I missed much of the gore and violence of Mirror Dance the first time I read it… I don’t know how I could possibly have missed how nasty the torture and violence was... I was deeply disturbed this time around. And I feel like I skimmed Memory the first time I read it- I’ve already blogged on Memory so won’t again, except to say it really affected/changed me this time. Good books!

Taken by Thomas Cook B-
Interesting. I kept reading this mostly to find out what was going to happen. The characters were rather flat, but the ideas were fun. I wish it had actually gone somewhere… Reminded me of King’s Firestarter a little, but definitely didn’t live up to King’s story-telling. I felt like Taken opened a can of worms and just left them flopping around on the concrete…

Divine by Mistake by P.C. Cast A-
I loved the narrator in this book, very quirky and fun. (My mom started this and told me she was ‘silly’ and she didn’t mean in a good way. I loved the sense of humor mixed throughout, perhaps because the author is an English teacher…) I enjoyed this very much. A woman is snatched from her world and thrust into some alternate dimension where she is now the goddess Epona’s spokesperson to her people, gets married to a centaur, and has to fight the vampires rampaging her country… Warning: yes, this is a fantasy book, but it’s under Harlequin’s new fantasy label, Luna, which means it’s a fantasy/romance. Yes, there’s some raciness to it, but rather mild. Harlequin has recently noticed the amount of women now reading fantasy & sci-fi and has pulled together some tried and true writers plus some newbies to make money off said readers. Some of the books are excellent, some are merely pathetic… This one was good.

Fortune’s Fool by Mercedes Lackey A
I enjoyed this so much!! Lackey’s combined so many wonderful fairy tale elements in her 500 Kingdoms novels and this is definitely my favorite so far. Fortune’s Fool is the story of the seventh son of a Russian King and the seventh daughter of the Sea King. They deal with Baba Yaga, a kitsune, a Jinn, dragons, the Little Humpback Horse, a Rusalka, a werewolf... And that’s only the stuff I can remember! Acres and acres of fairy-tale traditions surrounding the seventh child of a king and that’s what Lackey’s playing off of in this lovely little tale. Fun for the fairy-tale lover…

Spellsinger by Alan Dean Foster A
I read these a long time ago. Loved them then and it was fun to realize how good they really are as I re-read them almost 20 years later… I enjoy Foster’s humour and cynicism. A young college student is transferred from our world to a world of magic and enormous, intelligent animals in the hopes that he will be able to ‘save the world’. Good for laughs, sheer adventure and zaniness. I used to own all these, but in my first couple of years in college I hit a time when I was sure God was telling me to stop reading fantasy & magic so I ditched ‘em all. (didn’t burn ‘em, I’ve got a friend who did that, but I thought that was just silly… I gave ‘em to the local used book store and got credit! Far more practical.) Oh, I’ve mourned the loss of some of those books!!! I don’t know why God had me do that, maybe just to cause me to trust Him with all my belongings. Who knows. I’ve been able to re-read some of those I got rid of and discover how lousy they were- I’m delighted to say these are still excellent! It’s delightful to rediscover these characters: Jon-Tom, the transferred human and out-of-control magician; Mudge, the cynical, loyal and overly-sexed otter; Clothahump, the ancient tortoise magician who yanked Jon-Tom from a gentle marijuana aided sleep into a mysterious/shocking world of magic and death by skunk… (Another set I’ve mourned was Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame. I’ve read those since then and they weren’t quite as good as I’d remembered, but still very good.)

The Impatient Beader: Easy Jewelry Projects for the Busy Beginner by Margot Potter A
Excellent book for the beader. Interesting designs & concepts. Excellent & simple instructions. I want to buy this! (I checked it out from the library.) It’s not that I need the instructions or really the design projects, but I love looking at her stuff because they fill my head with ideas for my own stuff. Excellent as a spring-board for my own designs. (if you’re interested or knowledgeable, this one is mostly bead stringing projects)

Simply Beautiful Beading: 53 Quick and Easy Projects by Heidi Boyd A
Very simple book for the beginner. Interesting designs and concepts. Another library book I want to buy. An excellent springboard for the beading I already do. I like some of her projects, and some I’d NEVER even look at twice, but there’s enough here that it’s definitely a valuable resource. (Again, if you’re interested or knowledgeable, this one has a broad variety of projects- wirework, macramé, beaded boxes, etc.)