The Life of Jesus Advent Calendar - Day 8: Jesus Calls the First Disciples

Introduction

Imagine you're at work, doing the same old thing you do every day, trying to make a living to support your family, when a stranger who you've kind of seen around the place and heard a little bit about, comes up to you and says to you:

Follow me, and I will make you become [insert your occupation here] of men.

How would you respond? Would you assume they're a little mad, or trying to rope you into some sort of pyramid scheme? Or would you follow them, no questions asked?

For Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John, they didn't even stop to ask questions. Mark tells us they immediately left their boats, and the work that gave them some security, to follow Jesus who promised to make them "fishers of men". What do you think made them follow Jesus so eagerly?

Assembling your stocking

This stocking isn't too complicated, and you should be feeling more familiar with how these stockings fit together by now. The trickiest template here might be your boat mast - if it's easier to just cut out a strip of brown felt that's about the right length, just go ahead and do that.

Here you will be using your river Jordan template from stocking no. 6 to form the Sea of Galilee. I made my stitches a little more wavy and uneven to represent the waves on the sea, but stitch it down however you prefer.

At this point you will want to start paying attention to the colours you use for the disciples - I like to keep mine consistent throughout the advent calendar to help with the visual narrative. So I used light green for Simon in every scene he appears in, and so on.

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Then, layer up your cut outs - you will want to put the sail and the mast down first, then add two of your disciples on top of these, and then place the boat over them. Fiddle around with them until you're happy with the setting. I didn't add a mast and sail to the second boat as I was picturing them to be close to shore as John and James help their father fix the nets, but feel free to add in the second sail and mast if you would like to. You could omit the sail and masts altogether if you like!

I stitched everyone to be facing towards us, as though it is just before Jesus is about to call them to him. Again, I switch to blue thread for my blanket stitch when I get to the sea, but you don't have to.

I had grand aspirations of stitching some sort of fishing nets onto the characters as well, but sewed the back of the stocking on before I remembered that. It was probably a blessing in disguise, because I think figuring that out would have been too frustrating for me!

You can watch a brief video of this stocking being assembled on my Facebook or Instagram.

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