More cards (plus a D’oh! moment – or two!)

Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming to see me!

Today I have some more cards to show you.

At church, we have a mainly anglophone congregation – the services are in English, after all, although we have bi-lingual service books, we announce page- and hymn-numbers in French & English, and we say the Lord’s Prayer in both English and French. So, the French speakers who come are usually good in English (often from an Anglo-French background) and often coming from a Protestant/Eglise Reformée tradition. A few years ago, a French family joined us, whose English wasn’t great, but who had been brought by their then-7/8 year old daughter who wanted to know more about Protestantism (!!) They quickly became part of the church family, and Lilou, the daughter, was baptised, and went through confirmation, and started to acolyte.

She has had heart problems since she was born – one time when the Bishop was presiding, and Lilou was acolyting, she suddenly went white as a sheet, and started to sway. François, her father, realised what was happening, leapt to his feet and caught her before she fell to the floor. She was carried outside for air.. But recently things have deteriorated, and last week François shared with one of the Church members how Lilou’s health problems have worsened.

So Sheryl asked me to make a card for Lilou, to help (we hope) boost her spirits. So I came home early from work on Thursday and made this:

You may recognise the basic design from this post, when I made a similar card for Friend Alison’s daughter. This one is a bit bigger – giving room for people at church to sign it – but uses lots of Noz-sourced items: the gorgeous fox-y backing paper, the washi tapes used, the rosette, the letters, most of the embellishments…As I’ve said before, I love Noz! Other things such as the ribbon, the pink paper and a couple of other embellishments came as a result of blog swaps.

Inside the pocket, there are three little cards:

Que la grace de Dieu soit avec toi; Que Dieu te benisse (May God’s grace be with you; May God bless you)

Rappelle-toi: tu es (bother, I’ve just realised I put “est” which is the conjugation of “etre” for the third person singular, not the second person. Meh.) plus brave que tu ne le crois, tu es plus forte que tu ne le parais, et tu es plus douée que tu ne le penses. (Remember: you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and more talented than you think)

Everything is better with love and laughter

It is obviously the day for spelling/grammar mistakes, because I also made a card for Lilou’s parents, François and Frédérique:

This spelling mistake I saw as soon as I had written it (only because I was copying from a text, not because my French is good!)

“Fortress” in French is forteresse but I missed out the “e” in the middle of the word. But as it was the last thing – I’d made the entire card and was just writing the text – I’m afraid I just thought “Meh” and carried on! I didn’t have another piece of butterfly paper and I was also running late for dinner, so I just decided I’d be forgiven!

Of course, being English, spelling mistakes in French don’t leap out at me in quite the same way, and I automatically write “est” as I am writing the form of etre be it for tu, il, or elle. I hope that maybe they won’t jump out and spoil the card for the family. I fear they might though. I once received this card from a friend:

and while I really appreciate the sentiment, and the thought that went into it, every time I look at it my brain screams “That’s not how you spell falter!!!”

So possibly Lilou’s brain will be screaming “Es not est!!!”

And François will be thinking “Forteresse, pas fortresse!!!!”

Ah well…nobody’s perfect!