The OEDILF

The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form

"It is an expression of passion for the English language with each limerick representing a love letter addressed to a single word."

A dictionary's fun to read through,
But for this that's especially true:
Though it isn't complete,
What is there is a treat--
(Contributions acceptable, too.)

(But unfortunately not all the entries are child-friendly. Caveat emptor.)

Happy Birthday Jack!

C.S. Lewis was born 108 years ago today, November 29, 1898.

"Those of us who have been true
readers all our life seldom realize
fully the enormous extension of
our being which we owe to authors."

- from An Experiment in Criticism

The Unschooling Conspiracy

Spunky posted on her blog - lately the media has been "creating a little negative buzz about unschooling (and by inference homeschooling) as a legitimate educational choice for parents. . . . Going after a homeschooling subgroup creates a path to further limit all homeschoolers."

We don't unschool, but it might be my first choice if we weren't Charlotte Mason homeschoolers. Anyone who thinks unschooling doesn't work hasn't read Homeschooling for Excellence by David and Micki Colfax. They unschooled their four sons and three of them went on to Harvard.

Pictures from today

Golden-crowned kinglet. It's hard to tell here, but she's a tiny little bird--less than four inches long. She also has a bright yellow stripe atop her head that isn't visible in the picture.

Sycamores and barns with the old farmhouse at the end of the street.

Our Thanksgiving

I always enjoy reading how others spent their day and what recipes are traditional for them, so I thought I'd post about our day. We had a quiet Thanksgiving, we didn't have family to visit, and our best friends were out of town, so it was just us - which is fine, Mr. B is rarely home, so a day to just be together is always special. He played Scrabble with the boys, we had WDAV playing (classical internet radio), and Miss M made a pest of herself trying to get into everything by pulling up a chair so she could reach the counter while I was trying to work in the kitchen.

In the evening we usually watch a Thanksgiving video - we have a few things we taped off TV years ago - The Mouse on the Mayflower cartoon, a cartoon about William Bradford, a 1950's movie called Plymouth Adventure with Spencer Tracy, and a special from the Discovery channel about wild turkeys. I like to read something like Margaret Pumphrey's Stories of the Pilgrims during the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, but it didn't happen this year.

I did not stay on my raw diet. I planned beforehand to allow myself some turkey (plain, not even salt on it), stuffing-flavored rice (gluten-free), and a plain baked organic sweet potato, and I stuck to my plan.

For the rest of the family, I made everything traditionally. I'm a simple cook, we don't have gourmet tastes, so there's nothing particularly unusual about any of our recipes. Most of them are like what my mother always made. Turkey, simple bread stuffing (from the Better Homes and gardens Cookbook, my mother says), canned sweet potatoes with a little bit of margarine and drizzled with just a little maple syrup, mashed potatoes (dairy-free; I use rice milk), gravy from a jar (almost fat free!) and canned jellied cranberry sauce. There was also apple cider, frozen microwaved corn, baby carrots with margarine and tarragon, frozen green beans which I heated in the microwave and added grilled onions, a dark green salad, bread, and pies for dessert - pumpkin and apple bought frozen and baked the day before, served with Cool Whip (Lite).

I forgot to make biscuits the day before and realized I wouldn't have the oven to bake them on Thanksgiving day, so I went online and found a recipe for a Thanksgiving Bread that goes in the bread machine. My family liked it, so it's going to become our new Thanksgiving tradition. I made a few alterations because I didn't have corn meal, sage or minced dried onions, and I used partly whole wheat flour. Here's the recipe I used with my alterations:

1 cup warm water
1 egg
1 Tablespoon softened margarine
2 Tablespoons brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup cornbread mix
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups unbleached flour
2 teaspoons dried onion powder
1 1/2 teaspoons celery seed
1 teaspoon poultry seasoning
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast

Place everything in the bread machine in the order listed. Use basic white bread setting, 1 1/2 pound loaf size.

---------------------------------

And here's my gluten-free substitute for stuffing. It's the same recipe I've always used for bread stuffing, but with rice instead of bread. Miss M and J love it. They won't even eat bread stuffing any more. Too bad, since I made a huge batch of bread stuffing, and now Tim's the only one who will eat it. I'm making a second batch of rice stuffing today, and doubling the recipe. It won't fit in the rice cooker, so I've got it in the crock pot. I expect it will take 6-8 hours.

Stuffing Rice

Saute:
1 minced onion
1/4 c margarine

Add:
2 teaspoons poultry seasoning
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Throw in the rice cooker with:
1 1/2 cups brown rice
4 cups vegetable broth

This was done well before the turkey, so it warmed in the rice cooker for about an hour, which might have made it even better. This was the only part of the meal that Miss M went for in a big way. She wouldn't touch the bread stuffing.

This is the same recipe I use for bread stuffing - except that I use a loaf of whole wheat bread, toasted and cut into cubes, instead of rice, and less chicken broth.

-------------------------------

I also found an online site that praised the benefits of roasting a turkey frozen instead of defrosting it first. My turkey was already half thawed, but next year I'm just going to leave it in the freezer. There's no thawing raw juice to leak, and the white meat gets less dry because it's still thawing while the dark meat is baking.

Beware: Homeschoolers are a Threat!

The homeschool movement is growing. A large percentage of homeschoolers aren't teaching evolutionary science. Homeschool graduates are going to college. And not everyone is happy about that. In fact, this article makes it sound like some are alarmed and appalled. What is this world coming to when you can't guarantee 100 percent compliance to the accepted view of mainstream "truth"?

This article made me laugh. I pulled out a few quotes; the way they were arranged in the article really brought home the point that it's all about indoctrination, not education.


For these parents, religious instruction and science are often intertwined. This bothers Brian Alters of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who studies the changing face of science education in the US. He is appalled by some home-schooling textbooks, especially those on biology that claim they have scientific reasons for rejecting evolution. "They have gross scientific inaccuracies in them," he says. "They would not be allowed in any public school in the US, and yet these are the books primarily featured in home-schooling bookstores."

[I agree that some Christian science texts have inaccuracies. But so do public school texts. The texts that homeschoolers use would never be allowed in public schools - but not because they're more inaccurate than public school texts. It's because they don't teach the right dogma.]


"Poll after poll shows that approximately one out of two people in America reject evolution. They think the scientists, teachers and textbooks are wrong," he says. An even higher proportion of home-schooling parents may reject evolution, Alters thinks. "And they're going to be teaching science?"

[Scary, isn't it?]


However, not all home-school parents have a religious agenda. "There are probably some wonderful home-school parents, some of whom may be evolutionary biologists themselves. But I have a feeling after talking to a lot of home-schoolers that this is the minority," says Alters. Indeed, evangelical Christians do dominate the home-school movement. "It's disconcerting, to say the least," he says.

[I guess only non-religious evolutionary biologists should be granted the right to teach children.]

By 2004, Patrick Henry College (which caters to graduated homeschoolers) students held seven out of 100 internships in the White House, a number even more striking when one considers that only 240 students were enrolled in the entire college. Last year, two PHC graduates worked in the White House, six worked for members of Congress and eight for federal agencies, including two for the FBI. "Patrick Henry is something to worry about because these kids end up in the administration."

I found this article here by accident while I was cruising new blogs.

Overheard

Miss M was playing with a stuffed Bambi - a rare treat, since it's usually kept up. They must have been playing house, and Bambi was The Baby. First was a pathetic, pleading whine: "Pleeease, Mama, can I have milk outside? Please?" And then the Mommy, in a very fierce voice: "NO, Bambi! You can't have milk outside! People will be mad!" Followed by whimpering and more pleading from Bambi.

I've been explaining to Miss M that people don't like to see a big girl like her nursing, so we only nurse in private. It's interesting seeing how this concept might look to her three-year-old mind, and from the two different perspectives of the sad, pitiful nursling, and the non-yielding authority who controls the supply.

C.S. Lewis - Farewell to Shadowlands

"But indeed, after the water and the earth, I thought we had already crossed the brook in a sense."
"You will always be thinking that," said the Guide. "We call it Death in the Mountain language. It is too tough a morsel to eat at one bite. You will meet that brook more often than you think: and each time you will suppose that you have done with it for good. But some day you really will."
- The Pilgrim's Regress, Book 9, Chapter 6

And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goees on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
- The Last Battle, Chapter 16: Farewell to Shadowlands

C.S. Lewis

I'm a day late, but I wanted to remember him on the anniversary of his death. I've always liked him, but he became a personal hero after I read his Letters to Children. How can you not love someone who respected and took time for children the way he did?

"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from." from Till We Have Faces

"The essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends..." from A Christian Reply to Professor Price Phoenix Quarterly

A Month of Grace

Grace is a cosmic fact.

Grace is either a gift from above or a state within, a help of some kind or an experience reverently felt.

Grace is the benign effluence of the Overself, the kindly radiation from it, ever-present in us. The theological use of this term to mean particular help given by God to man to enable him to endure temptation and act rightly is a serious and arbitrary narrowing down of its original meaning. It may mean this sometimes, but it also means the loving mercy God shows to man, which appears variously as enlightenment of the mind or relief of the heart, as change of outward physical conditions or a dynamic revolution-working energy acting on the aspirant or on his life.

The grace is always present since the Infinite Power, from which it originally comes, is always present.

There are little graces, such as those which produce the glimpse; but there is only one great Grace: this produces a lasting transformation, a deep radical healing and permanent enlightenment.

Paul Brunton

Make Your Own Graph Paper

Free Online Graph Paper - you tell it how many squares per inch, and it creates a pdf file! Graph paper is one of my favorite things in the whole world. Thank you, Mama Squirrel!

A Month of Grace

Gifts are as the gold which adorns the temple; grace is like the temple that sanctifies the gold.
William Burkitt

But grace means more than gifts. In grace something is transcended, once and for all overcome. Grace happens in spite of something; it happens in spite of separateness and alienation. Grace means that life is once again united with life, self is reconciled with self. Grace means accepting the abandoned one. Grace transforms fate into a meaningful vocation. It transform guilt to trust and courage. The word grace has something triumphant in it.
Yrj Kallinen, Finnish thinker writing about Paul Tillich's thinking

The Poem

A string of words is a dangerous thing,
For no man knows where it will stop
Save he take up the strands, and following,
Discover its end, or read till he drop.

Unfurled on the page lay the poem before him,
Inviting him in with its ink-lettered glory,
Calling him sweetly to read of its verses--
(Oh, the innocent lure of those letters!)
So he took it up slowly; and the tugging words caught him
And carried him on, like a stream rolling swiftly
In its widening course, ever deeper and stronger,
O'er difficult passages, from line to line leaping,
Ceaselessly flowing from its source to the sea:
Then he stood at the prow of his vessel of thought
On an ocean of language, and the surging waves
Bore him up higher and higher, till breathless
He clung to a lifeline of thought--and the billows
Upswelled to a toppling summit, and he saw
Through the spindrift a deepening valley--
(And the sea bore him on, while the wind sang past)--
Then he fell from his boat and was tumbled by currents
Under words, over words, eddying round him,
Till they caught him and tossed him and sucked him down under
And he drowned in the plunging word-swell of the sea.

For a string of words is a dangerous thing,
And no man knows where it will stop
Save he take up the strands, and following,
Discover its end, or read till he drop.

Just David

I started this book two nights ago. And so far I like The Mouse and His Child better. David is innocent, good, eager, a child of nature - and I'm finding him annoying and not very likable. I can't put my finger on why. He doesn't "get" anything. When asked to fill a woodbox, he gets distracted watching spiders and butterflies, and when asked to weed the garden that supplies the family diet, he can't understand why he should pull out all the pretty plants. Then he neglects his work because he was suddenly struck with a desire to play his violin when he sees some pansies, and he can't wait to play it because he'll "lose the song." He seems to be a high maintenance child.

And I don't like the farm couple who get stuck taking care of him any better. They have absolutely no patience for a child who just lost his father and doesn't seem to understand. Instead of helping him along, they just get irritated about the extra work he makes for them.

And I don't like the dead father who created this predicament for David and the couple. He could have taught David to think of others and be helpful. But David only seems to think about himself and his impulsive desires. It's all innocent and sweet, but it still feels self-obsessed.

And I have a sinking feeling that the author is going to make it out as if David's free-spiritedness will bring light and harmony and joy to everyone around him because they, too, will discover the fulfillment and peace of thinking of their own inner longings instead of constantly being preoccupied with their daily routine chores.

Mozart

AO's composer this term is Mozart, and, for the first time in a long time, we're taking time to really explore Mozart. We're playing Mozart music (originally using free downloads from ClassicalArchives, but more and more playing CD's as we add to our collection), we read The Wonder Boy by Opal Wheeler, and Tim and I are reading the Mozart biography by Marcia Davenport. It requires just a bit of editing for students. When we read about a piece that piques our curiosity, we go to amazon.com and buy a used copy. We bought the Six Haydn-Quartets because we read about Mozart composing them and wanted to hear them. After reading the reviews at amazon, we settled on a set recorded sixty years ago by the Budapest Quartet (a Russian group!) Tonight we read this in Davenport's biography:

" . . . the G minor quintet (K. 516) with two violas. This quintet is a glimpse into Wolfgang's soul; an epic statement; a summing up; a prophecy. The man who has been called superficial gathered all the hidden pain and passion of nine troubled years and gave them an expression that lives and will live forever in its sheer elemental truth. The piece sets and holds a keynote of intense, passionate excitement which more than accounts for the apparent absence of this in Wolfgang's visible life. It is possible to interpret the work in terms of his own misforfunes, expounded and then protested in vivid poignancy. But it is better to know that he, true artist, rose above autobiographical emotion and turned his personal passion into universal force. The tragic mood of the first four movements, culminating in the black sorrow of the last Adagio, is swept away in the supreme bliss of the final Allegro. This is no conventional happy ending, but a moment when Wolfgang opens the door to his spirit, which is clear and radiant and beautiful, and not to be extinguished by any mortal hardship. That he knew always. No biographer, no commentator, critic, or interpreter can ever reveal Wolfgang Mozart entirely. Every attempt to know him truly, to relive his life, is incomplete without his own musical revelations. Such are this quintet and his Requiem. To know them deeply is to know him."

As it turns out, that quintet is included on the Budapest Quartet CD, so Tim and I were able to hear it. I plan to listen to it once every day until it becomes familiar, and until I begin to understand what she's talking about. At first listen, I didn't think the sorrow was "black." It was just melancholy. I'd call it brown.

Finished Book 1

I finished the first book of my Stacks challenge - The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban.

It's about a wind-up toy mouse who turns and lifts a little mouse into the air, like a father swinging his child in the air in circles. They're in a store with other toys and a grand Victorian mansion. They're sold, and they soon break and are thrown out, and the rest of the book is about their search to recapture their glorious past when they felt like they belonged in a kind of family in the mansion. It was not bad, decently written, I thought.

I'll read Just David next.

Checking In

My best friend was here for a visit - it was too short, just a few days. The funny thing is, we met on a music message board because we both liked a particular songwriter, and now, five years later (or is it six?) we didn't even play his music. We had too many other things to listen to, and too many other things to do and talk about.

We're both starting a new exercise routine - The Bar Method. I bought the DVD so we could both check it out together and we like it, so she's getting her own copy. It's a combination of isometrics, resistance, yoga and weights. Low impact, not too boring. I did the routine for the first time this evening. They say you start to notice a difference after ten times. We'll see.

A Month of Grace

Not Works

Grace, triumphant in the throne,
Scorns a rival, reigns alone;
Come and bow beneath her sway;
Cast your idol works away!
Works of man, when made his plea,
Never shall accepted be;
Fruits of pride (vainglorious worm!)
Are the best he can perform.

Self, the god his soul adores,
Influences all his powers;
Jesus is a slighted name,
Self-advancement all his aim:
But when God the Judge shall come,
To pronounce the final doom,
Then for rocks and hills to hide
All his works and all his pride!

Still the boasting heart replies,
What the worthy and the wise,
Friends to temperance and peace,
Have not these a righteousness?
Banish every vain pretence
Built on human excellence;
Perish everything in man,
But the grace that never can.

by William Cowper

A Month of Grace

Laughter is the closes thing to the grace of God.
Karl Barth


The unthankful heart ... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart weep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!
Henry Ward Beecher

A Month of Grace

For I am sure that no man asketh mercy and grace with sincerity, without mercy and grace being given to him first.
Julian of Norwich

A Month of Grace

Grace is available for each of us every day -- our spiritual daily bread -- but we've got to remember to ask for it with a grateful heart and not worry about whether there will be enough for tomorrow.
Sarah Ban Breathnach

The most perfect instrument of tyranny...

I found this excellent quote in the otherwise middling 7 Men Who Rule the World from the Grave:

"A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficial achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument of tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the Middle Ages was combatted by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective. Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the ultimate control of experts appointed by the State, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist."

Christianity and Liberalism (1924) by J. Gresham Machen

A Month of Grace

Grace is free sovereign favor to the ill-deserving.
Benjamin B. Warfield


If any man ascribes anything of salvation, even the very least thing, to the free will of man, he knows nothing of grace, and he has not learned Jesus Christ rightly.
Martin Luther

Composition Notebooks and Narration

Using our new composition notebooks has been educational, not just for the kids, but for me, too. I've been a bit frustrated at our exams because the kids don't remember details from their reading, but I haven't known what to do about it, unless I start giving them lists of names, dates and places to memorize. J and L haven't been writing much for school at all. L is ten and just getting to the point where he'd be doing written narrations, so I had started having him do one a week at the beginning of this term six weeks ago. I hadn't been requiring any more than one a week from J because he's still learning to spell and I didn't want to ask too much of him.

So I made them each a composition notebook, a handy size they could fill in a term, and asked them to write a brief summary of everything they read for school. They still narrate orally - longer oral narrations, but concise snippets for their books. That was my thought. So far it's been going well. The biggest surprise is J (Year 7). He doesn't want to write concise summary snippets. He says he'll remember better if he writes more, and he says he loves to write. Who knew? He requested that he do written narrations instead of oral, so we'll try that and see how it goes.

This morning I wrote down some names on a sheet of paper before we read 1 Sam 26 - Saul, Abner, David and Abishai. I told them I wanted them to use those names in their written narrations, and I left the paper out for them to spell the names correctly. Charlotte Mason did that - writing certain things on the chalkboard that she wanted her students to look for in their reading. I don't know if she left them up for her students to copy the spelling. She probably had them memorize the spelling by closing their eyes and visualizing the word, and then erased the board. But we're taking this one step at a time.

L was having a tough time with his Plutarch narration, so I let him dictate it to me - he knew what he wanted to say, but he was having trouble getting it on to the page. I wrote it out on a scrap sheet of paper as he dictated, and he copied that into his booklet in his own handwriting. I noticed that he revised and consolidated as he copied, which is probably a beneficial exercise in itself. I think we're going to do his Plutarch narrations this way from now on.

I don't know what kind of a difference all this is going to make educationally - I won't find out until exam time. But I think it will help.

Here's a peek at their notebooks to show how they're set up and how we're utilizing the space on the pages. This is pretty much how the notebooks I saw from some PNEU students were done - with more than one entry on each page, and each entry dated.

L's book, age ten, Ambleside Online Year 4


J's book, age 13, Ambleside Online Year 7


T's book, age 16, Ambleside Online Year 11; his book is not only a bit bigger, but it has more pages - 48. He'll fill his because he writes more - written narrations are nothing new to him.


Miss M, age 3, Ambleside Online Year 0, has her own book - I gave her the one that I accidentally put the pages in upside down so the top margin is at the bottom. She likes to do whatever her brothers are doing!

Do Parents Have the Right Not to Education Their Children?

"If you're a homeschooler you have heard that question or some variation on it from somebody advocating greater restrictions on homeschoolers. Often it will be accompanied with a sort of backhanded compliment something like this, 'I know you'll educate your children, but what about the parents who won't?'"

The Headmistress at The Common Room wrote an excellent response to this kind of question in which she considers that, with the public schools graduating 25 percent of their students still illiterate, why are we assuming that it's the homeschoolers (who have a 90 percent success rate) who need policing? "...indoctrination is really what it's all about. One reason public schools fail to teach so many children to read is because they are most interested in teaching them something else altogether."

Read the whole post here.

A Month of Grace

Dependence

To keep the lamp alive,
With oil we fill the bowl;
'Tis water makes the willow thrive,
And grace that feeds the soul.

The Lord's unsparing hand
Supplies the living stream;
It is not at our own command,
But still derived from Him.

Beware of Peter's word,
Nor confidently say,
"I never will deny Thee, Lord," --
But, -- "Grant I never may."

Man's wisdom is to seek
His strength in God alone;
And e'en an angel would be weak,
Who trusted in his own.

Retreat beneath his wings,
And in His gace confide!
This more exalts the King of kings
Than all your works beside.

In Jesus is our store,
Grace issues from His throne;
Whoever says, "I want no more,"
Confesses he has done.

by William Cowper

Stacks Winter Reading Challenge

Krakovianka posted about this reading challenge:
"If you are anything like me your stack of purchased to-be-read books is teetering over. So for this challenge we would be reading 5 books that we have already purchased, have been meaning to get to, have been sitting on the nightstand and haven't read before." They're hoping to get people signed up by Nov 15.

Krakovianka is going to read War and Peace, a Polish book and something by Jane Austen that I've never heard of. My list won't be quite so serious. We recently sorted and reshelved all of our books, and I came across some children's books that I'd been meaning to read. And here's my opportunity!

My five selections:

Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer
Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge
The Iliad for Boys and Girls by Alfred Church
All of a Kind Family by Sydney Taylor
Just David by Eleanor Porter
The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban

Okay, so that's six. But I've been wanting to read all of these. And, with my schedule, children's books are probably all I'll be able to manage.

A Month of Grace

Grace means the free, unmerited, unexpected love of God, and all the benefits, delights, and comforts which flow from it. It means that while we were sinners and enemies we have been treated as sons and heirs.
R. P. C. Hanson


We're all stumbling towards the light with varying degrees of grace at any given moment.
Bo Lozoff

A Month of Grace

The grace of the spirit comes only from heaven, and lights up the whole bodily presence.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon


Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.
Jonathan Edwards

Making Envelopes

I was asked how to make envelopes, so, since that's the one thing I do really well, I was happy to share.

It helps to understand what an envelope is: just a sheet of paper wrapped around something. The ends need to meet and overlap so they can be secured together. It's basically wrapping paper. The simplest envelopes are merely squarish flaps at the top and bottom, with narrow little flaps folding in on the sides. In some really cheap envelopes, the side flaps are even left out - some cheap Valentine's Day cards just glue the sides of the envelope together without bothering to have side flaps.

As the flaps are tapered more and more to form a shape closer and closer to a triangle, the sides need to be wider to compensate. You can see that in the diagrams below. Generally, you can tell whether your envelope will need to have squared flaps or triangular ones by placing the item you want to wrap on the paper you're going to cut the envelope out of, and seeing how much room you have for side flaps. How much width is available for side flaps will determine how much you can taper the top and bottom flaps of the envelope. I like flaps that are almost perfect triangles like a Hallmark card envelope.

Even an envelope with squared flaps can look really nice if the bottom flap covers two-thirds of the body of the envelope or more and the top flap covers almost half. A generous top flap makes all the difference. The ratio where the lines meet can make the envelope pleasing or awkward - I imagine it has to do with composition, like the rule of thirds in photography.

If you can design the envelope so that it's placed squarely on an 8 1/2 x 11" sheet of paper rather than diagonal, you can run the paper through your computer printer first and print a return address label in the proper place before cutting them out (I do this routinely).

I guess you could print designs on them, too. Or, if you have a paper cutter or scissors to cut patterns, you can make the top flap really pretty. I've never done that; for me, the challenge and satisfaction is in finding the perfect ratio of height/width, and flap size.

Instructions for making your own envelopes are divided into multiple blog posts.

Getting Started
Making the Template, part 1 and part 2
Cutting them out
The Final Steps: gluing and folding them






Note that, as the top and bottom taper in more and more, you'll need more side to cover the contents. Keeping that in mind will help as you consider the design of your envelope.

Envelope-Making 101: Setting Up

There are a LOT of photos with this, so I've uploaded all of them in five separate posts, and I'll add the text next.

You'll need a sheet or two of graph paper to get really even measured cut-outs, a stiff sheet of paper or cardboard to make the template, scissors, glue, stapler, some paper to make the envelopes out of (I use scrap paper) and a pencil.



Trim the graph paper along marked lines so that you're starting from exact squares.



Measure how big the envelope needs to be. It should be about a quarter inch larger than what's going in it so it goes in and out easily, larger if what you're putting in it is thick. I think I'll make some envelopes for all my money.


Cut exactly, using the grid lines as a guide. Use the first graph paper rectangle to measure a second one.



Cut two identical rectangles from graph paper.

Envelope-Making 101: Start the Template

Use one graph-paper rectangle to trace a rectangle on the stiff paper. Arrange it so that you've left room for a top and bottom and side flaps.



Now fold the graph paper in half. You'll be measuring to make the top flap, but you'll do half of it in order to get an exact mirror image.


Draw dots about a half inch (for a small envelope) or whole inch (for a bigger envelope) from the corners. The slant of the top flap is more slanted near the corners of the envelope. The dot will mark where the slant changes.



Connect the dots using a paper edge to make your line straight.



Sketch out the shape, connecting the straight line to the corners, rounding slightly where the dots are. These rounded edges are what will help make the envelope look nice.



Cut along the line, and then unfold. This symetrical triangular-shape is what you'll trace to make the top flap.



Trace its shape in three places: where the flap goes on the stiff paper, inside the rectangle (to help visualize how the flaps look as you go), and on the other piece of graph rectangle to help show where to measure for the other flaps.

Envelope-Making 101: Finish the Template

You traced the shape of the top flap on the second piece of graph paper. Now sketch out an overlapping shape to use as mirror images for a side flap. It doesn't need to come to the middle if the bottom and tops will overlap in that middle section.


The corner should be pleasantly rounded.


The bottom of the side flap is done the same way, keeping in mind an idea of where the bottom flap will go.You only need to cut out one of these side flaps.



Use the side flap to trace its shape on the stiff paper and on what remains of the graph paper. Remember not to trace the flap upside down!


Now for bottom flap. You'll make a mirror image of this and flip it to trace both sides (or you can use a third graph paper rectangle!) So you only need half of the sheet.


Take a look at where the side and top will be meeting and overlapping. Mark a dot where the bottom of the envelope should meet the side. Also make a dot near the corner. That marks where the slant will change, being steeper near the corner and more gentle towards the middle of the envelope. Note that I've shaded the area where the flaps will overlap to help visualize where the bottom flap needs to be. After sketching out the shape, cut it out.



Trace half the shape, flip and trace the other half.



Trace the shape again inside the envelope to help visualize what the envelope will look like. All the flaps should provide enough overlap that there are no open cracks.

Envelope-Making 101: Cutting Out

The template is now finished and only needs to be cut out.


All ready for tracing!



Trace it onto a sheet of paper. If the template is too long to fit straight up and down, don't be afraid to turn it to a diagonal.



Using the paper with the traced template shape as the top, staple 5 or 6 sheets of paper around the envelope shape. This will hold the paper together so you can cut out 5 or 6 envelopes at a time.


All cut out!

Envelope-Making 101: Glue, Fold and Finished

Fold the sides in, being diligent to fold exactly from corner to corner. Being exact is what will make your envelopes crisp and even and not lopsided-looking.


Fold the bottom the same way - corner to corner.


All folded and ready for gluing!



Take a look at where the sides and bottom overlap - glue goes in the overlap area. If you get glue outside that overlap area, you'll glue flaps shut or glue two envelopes together when they're stacked. I've shaded to show where the overlap areas are. Glue ONLY goes within those shaded areas.



Within that shaded area, you'll lay a line of glue close enough to the edge to make the edges tight, but not so close that glue squeezes out into areas you don't want it. I've drawn a squiggly black line to show where to set the bead-line of glue.



Use as thin a bead of glue as you can. It doesn't take much glue to hold paper flaps together, and too much wet glue will squeeze out where you don't it and warp the paper. That doesn't look nice.


All glued!


Now it's time to fold down the top flaps.



The five-dollar-bill fits inside very nicely.



I secured the top flap down with a dot of glue.

Don't forget to close your bottle of glue! Glue evaporates pretty quickly, and thickened glue is harder to work with when you're trying to get a very thin bead for envelope flaps.

These pretty envelopes with triangular flaps work well for smaller envelopes where you have space to spread it out on an 8 1/2x11" paper, but larger envelopes sometimes require squared flaps to make them fit. To see if something will fit in an envelope made from an 8 1/2 x 11" sheet of paper, lay it on the paper and wrap the paper around it. You have to be able to get the paper all the way around it with a little left over to glue. Sometimes it works by turning to a diagonal, sometimes it works by using narrow rectangular flaps. (I'll show how to make a rectangular flapped envelope another time.)

Of course, you're not limited to 8 1/2x11" paper. I've used gift wrap, grocery bags, manila folders, light cardboard from packaging, poster board, and pretty bags from nicer department stores.

A Month of Grace

Grace is savage and must be savage in order to be perfect.
Charles A. Stoddard

Make Your Own Composition Book

These are the materials you'll need: large cover stock, legal paper, a stiff piece cardboard cut to the exact size of the book for trimming, a needle, heavy-duty craft thread, a thumbtack to punch holes, a template and pencil (or pen) to make a nice design on the front, and a pair of scissors.


Print 12 sheets of lined paper, both sides, on the legal paper. I created a Word document for this task.


Lay out the printed sheets of legal-sized paper.


Fold them in half.


Fold a sheet of large cover stock paper for the cover.


Put the paper inside the cover.


If your cover is way bigger than the paper, it can be trimmed (but not too close; just a rough cut!) so the clips go on.


Clip the cover to the pages so they'll stay still during sewing. I could use more clips for this, but all I have are two.


Punch holes about every inch. It's hard to get a needle through 12 sheets of paper and a cover. This step makes it easier for sewing.

Blogger wouldn't let me upload any more photos, so I'll put the rest on its own post, here.

And you can see ours in use here.