Preparing the Gifts – how we created our very first fabric learning set!

Dear friends,

Thank you so much for following us at Orthodox Pebbles, where we have been keeping you updated on our work through the blog feature of our website. We are now working towards migrating to Mailchimp for email updates, a service that offers greater flexibility. Going forward, we would like to gradually turn the blog space you were following until now into a behind-the-scenes commentary area, where we can share details of our creative process and thoughts about our work. You can always opt out of either our email list or our blog notifications at any time.

Together with Kelsey at St. Tabitha’s Workshop, we have been working on our latest project for a long time, and we are very excited to be finally able to share it with you. It is a hands-on children’s learning set made out of soft fleece, to help teach our young ones about the Holy Eucharist and the preparation of the Holy Gifts.

PLEASE CLICK HERE for the product details.

You may have already seen the Pascha learning sets we published in the spring. The Holy Gifts set was actually the first set we worked on, before we even started any of our other fabric products, and we went through various stages of planning and designing it.

This was our very first educational fabric product, and our sole intention in making it was to help little children better learn and understand our Faith; still, we were very concerned about the possibility of our set trivializing such a sacred Orthodox theme as the Holy Eucharist – therefore, we discussed our idea with a number of priests and religious educators to get their insight.

One of the most challenging parts in this process was, while living in the United States, showing it to Natalie’s spiritual father to get his opinion and blessing – he is living in a monastery in Greece. Thankfully, at this day and age and with a little extra effort, technology can even reach secluded Greek monasteries!

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This set would be our very first item offered for sale, so researching copyright specifics, we found out there are restrictions in the use of scrapbook paper in artwork – we had been using scrapbook paper until then to make our illustration collages. Thus, Natalie set forth to create her own papers and patterns, and then digitally reworked her previous hand-cut illustrations to replace the scrapbook paper.

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The positive outcome from all this effort was the realization that using our own paper and patterns, plus digitally reworking our illustrations, allows for much greater creative freedom and expression. If you browse through our material and compare our earlier to our most current work, you will see how, during the past year, we gradually stopped using scrapbook paper and started creating all our illustrations by drawing, cutting, gluing, and digitally manipulating our own papers and patterns.

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After many changes and tweaks, we reached the final design. We thought you might enjoy some images from the planning process.

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We were SUPER EXCITED to receive our very first fabric sample and have our own children try it out!

We hope you get to enjoy our set as much as we have enjoyed creating it – and, as always, we’d love to hear from you!