Fig. 120.

CHAPTER IV
VACATION WORK WITH NATURE’S
MATERIAL

Here is a piece of advice for you, girls; possibly it may not be appreciated, but it is good advice, nevertheless: While you are away for your summer holidays, keep out of sight the fancy work you do at home.

When we drop the work or study that has employed us during the long winter and spring months and go off in the summer to be refreshed and invigorated, do we not say we go for recreation? If you will stop to think about it you will see that recreation means literally re-creating, being created anew; it means the laying aside of our ordinary habits and thoughts and adopting entire new ones, for the time being at least. It is this refreshing change of thought and occupation as well as change of air that proves so beneficial; therefore, don’t keep the one little portion of your brain which you devote to fancy work busy all summer long in the old routine, but let it have recreation as well as the rest of your mind and body.

By this I do not mean that the faculty ordinarily exercised in the interest of fancy work should not be used in any way, or that the hands which take so kindly to needle and thread should be always idle. Not at all; but there are other forms of work for quiet hours, distinctively summer work, which with their entire or comparative novelty refresh the mind and give added deftness to the hands.

Cone Hanging-basket.

The rainy day comes occasionally and you cannot be out of doors; then is the time to look over the store of treasures which you have gathered in your walks through wood and field and try to devise some means of preserving them or making them of use. To begin with, there are your pine cones, and no doubt you have gathered a great number of them; everyone does. Sort the cones and select several of the largest, most open ones to use as hanging-baskets in your window next winter, and if you have an open fire devote the remaining cones to creating a cheery blaze, to help disperse the gloom that a northeast storm in summer is apt to throw over one.

If you are impatient to try the experiment of making a