The Wrist Rosary Project

During Lent this year, I took up reading the Daily Office (morning, noon, evening, and end-of-day prayers). Since Holy Week I have completely lost all the discipline I built up during Lent and it makes me very disappointed in myself. Why should I only observe this practice of daily prayer for 40 days out of the year? I recently discovered The Daily Office online and signed up for morning and evening prayer to be sent to my email every day. It simplified the process for me by putting together the daily Psalms, lessons, and prayers as given in the lectionary. I've been faithfully reading morning and evening prayer for a week or so now (I did it sporadically for about two weeks before I got my act together). I also bought a copy of The New Oxford Annotated Study Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version so I could better understand the context of my daily readings, and I've enjoyed that.

In addition to daily readings, I really wanted to get into the habit of daily prayer. We say a blessing before we sit down to dinner, but we don't always remember to say one before breakfast or lunch. Some days, after I've read morning prayer, I sit on the couch with my cup of coffee and pray a rosary. I always keep a couple rosaries in my purse (you never know when you might need to whip one out), but they've fallen into the trap of out-of-sight-out-of-mind. So I decided to start making wrist rosaries (a single decade) that I could wear on a daily basis to remind me pray. So much of my time is spent just sitting around waiting for something, when I could be praying instead.

So my new craft project is to make wrist rosaries. LOTS of them. Enough in different sizes, colors, and designs that I can wear one with every outfit and not have an excuse to leave it behind. I might even make a few five-decade wrist rosaries to resemble multi-strand bracelets. Here are some photos of the one I made just this afternoon. The Our Father and Hail Mary beads are Chinese Jasper and the spacers are glass beads I bought in a multi-pack from Wal-Mart.