There is a post about my son Nolan’s latest projects, at my Russian site. Here’s one picture:

He painted a bicycle and a hand truck.

My daughter wanted to paint her Toyota 4WD truck, so I helped. Turns out there was a reason the previous owner painted it flat black…it had a LOT of dents. We finally had all the prep done, and went to paint it on the July 4th weekend. Anything that could go wrong did. The dark grey paint I thought I had was dried up in the can. I mixed up this blue grey color, but the first batch activated in 5 minutes. I’ve never seen that before. Good thing I hadn’t poured it into my spray gun yet. within 20 seconds of finishing the painting, it started to sprinkle. We were able to move it into the barn.

Recently I’ve realized that so much of my life involves restoration of something. For years I’ve wondered how effective it would be to dye a few old pairs of jeans. So I finally tried it. Below are some pictures. The process didn’t eliminate paints spots, but what I was wanting was to cover the brownish oil stains on the thighs. I think it did that. In the first picture, my youngest son is digging a flat place for the fire.

Thinking about a Bible verse, I remembered the passage from Mark chapter 9, where Jesus is glorified in front of a few apostles:

“And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them.”

A fuller was one who made clothes whiter, not dyed them. But it’s the first thing I thought of, There is of course the favorable account of Lydia, who was a seller of Purple, which was either a dye or expensive cloth. Here’s part of the account in the book of Acts. She was among people worshiping God by the river, but who didn’t know about Jesus:

(Acts 16:14 [KJV])
And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us: whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul.