Prayer Book

A friend of mine from college days has begun investigating the Orthodox Church, to which I belong. We've not been close since graduation, but Facebook has reconnected us in recent months. I was quite surprised to hear of his journey into Orthodoxy, although not the reasons for it, once we traded some lengthy e-mails. In any case, I wanted to make him something that would perhaps help him along the way. I find most Orthodox prayer books to be overwhelming if you are just learning about the faith, so I decided to make him one that used selections from the Big-Daddy of prayer books, The Jordanville Prayer Book. It has good translations and more importantly, is available full-text online, so it was easier to manipulate the text in Publisher.

I chose a shortened selection from the Morning Prayers, Evening Prayers and added the Prayers Before and After Meals, plus a few other little things like St. John of Kronstadt's meditation on the Jesus Prayer. It's short and sweet and pocket sized. I did the binding myself and I'm pretty happy with it! I even managed to use one of the ribbon ends to form a book mark--how about that for fancy-schmancy? I'm also including a diptych from Sofrino that I bought a few years ago and had in the delivery room with Harry--we have a surplus of diptychs lying around and I figured my friend would probably like to have one. It works well with the prayer book! I was hoping we had a spare chotki lying around as well, but my husband is prone to losing his and so he can't even find his right now, much less a spare one!

Anyway, here it is:

Supplies: Black Italian book cloth, Ballet Blue Cardstock, black 1/4" grosgrain ribbon, silver raised letter stickers, cream cardstock, Crop-A-Dile (to punch holes in the chipboard on the hinge), sewing needle with huge eye for ribbon sewing, hole punch, bone folder, Book glue, wide flat brush, left over icon print of SS Joachim and Anna for inside cover.