The Rosary Project

 We have a  book that we love to use while praying  the Rosary.  It's an enormous three feet tall, and it features beautiful icon-like images for each decade and smaller, cartoon-like images for each Hail Mary (along with a scripture quote for each Hail Mary).  It's a beautiful, thoughtful, prayerful work that makes Rosary praying easy, even for distraction prone young kids (and parents).

If you aren't Catholic, the Rosary is a prayer in which you say decades (groups of 10 Hail Marys) while meditating on events in the life of Christ.  The Hail Marys are there to keep track of the length of the meditation, to involve your body in the prayer, and, originally, as a way for illiterate people to "say" all 150 psalms like the monks did.  But the heart of the prayer is the meditation, and the greatest difficulty is distraction, and that was what was so great about this book!

The problem?  They only made one book!  They started with the Joyful Mysteries and then... stopped!  It must not have sold well enough, and it must have been very expensive to produce. It's also out of print. :(

I've been griping about the lack for several years now, and it finally occurred to me that I could make something similar.

Lacking in the kind of talent which produced the first book, I turned to Google.  The kids and I googled the first Luminous Mystery, the Baptism of the Lord, and did an image search.  We picked out 12 diversely appealing images, then printed them and cut them out as 3 by 5s.


I then wrote out scripture verses on the backs of the cards.  I totally cheated on this one, using my scriptural Rosary app.  Then I realized I could get the quotes on line, so, for the next batch, I printed them out and glue sticked the quotes to the backs of the pictures. Easy peasy!

I lay the cards on contact paper, then folded over the contact paper so the cards were laminated.  I cut these out, then punched a hole in one corner.  I unfolded a paper clip and used that as a ring to bind them together.

The reason I use 12 pictures is this: one is the cover, and on the back of that one, I write the fruit of the mystery and the words "Our Father."  This way, when you flip over the cover, you have your picture meditation for the Our Father.  The next flip gives you "1st Hail Mary (and the scripture quote)" across from the meditation picture for that Hail Mary.  The 12th picture (the 10th Hail Mary meditation picture) has the Glory Be on the back of it.

So far we've made The Baptism of the Lord and The Wedding at Cana, and I hope to do them all!

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