Last year, I set out to make something similar to Jennifer's Wildflowers and Marbles' Father Oak. Which actually means I convinced my poor mother and father to do it for me! LOL! We were all so thrilled with him! So, after a year of having him as a regular part of our family, I'm finally getting around to blogging about him.
We call him FATHER BIRCH, for obvious reasons *wink*. He is quite mobile and moves around the house, sometimes resting on our Sacred Heart altar, sometimes on the children's area where we have various liturgical things set up, and sometimes as the centerpiece on the dining room table. These are some pictures from previous posts in red for Palm Sunday and Pentecost:
Here he is with all his vestments, made by the very willing and talented Grandma Charlotte:
We keep all this in a shoe box that is accessible and the girls can change the vestments whenever they want or according to the feast day colors.
The chasubles (violet, green, white, red and rose) are 17" long, 6.5" wide. They are made from a satin material, which was hard to work with, but that's what I found at the fabric store for practically nothing. Felt would probably be the simplest to use. We put gold ribbon around the outside on some just to make them more fancy, but not necessary.
The blue stole is for Marian feast days and it is felt with gold ribbon attached. The red stole is a ribbon with a material backing to make it a bit more stiff. And, the white stole is white material (same as chasuble) with gold ribbon.
Here he is on a Marian feast day:
And, a close-up of the wooden underneath that my dad made:
He is 9" tall and 7.5" wide. The pattern that we based him off of is at Wildflowers and Marbles that I linked above.
We've been thrilled with Father Birch, and how it's incorporated the liturgical colors in our home. And, as always I'm extremely grateful to my mom and dad for their hard work and putting up with my nonsense!
