God has blessed us with five wonderful icons for the further beautification of our Church, which is dedicated to the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God (celebrated October 1/14).

Two of these icons were painted by Matushka Anne Margitich of St. John the Baptist and a “close-up” of the Theotokos holding her omophorion of protection and supplicating Christ taken from the icon of the Feast of the Protection itself. Matushka Margitich has also painted the other icons on the Church’s iconostasis and in the high place of the altar.

Another icon was painted by John Shayne Swenson of St. Gregory the Theologian, upon which a relic of that saint has been placed.

Two other icons were painted by Barbara Orsborn – one depicting the arrival of the Valaam Monastery monks who first evangelized the native peoples of Alaska, and the other of St. Tryphon of Vyatka.

After many days of difficult work it looks like we have finally completed the newest versions of the monastery’s online blog and online store. It is possible that there may still be a few bugs to work out, but glory be to God that the main part of the work seems to be in place and was ready to go on the feast of Mid Pentecost!

Glory be to God for all things!

Recent photo taken in the monastery church on Pascha.

As mentioned before we have slowly been expanding our online store with some hand-made products of the monks themselves. The previous post showed some of the production of one of our new soaps (kaleido-soap) and today we are pleased to announce that four new soaps are now available!

These soaps include the aforementioned kaleido-soap, gardenia, cook’s coffee soap (a limited time offer specially intended for the kitchen) and tea tree bubble.

Kaleido-soap	Gardenia
Cook’s Coffee	Tea Tree Bubble

We have expanded and further categorized our soap offerings as well, including the General Soap Page where all our offerings can be found, and the three different categories of Nature’s Soaps, Swirl Soaps and Bubble Soaps.

You will also find other limited time offers of books from our on-site monastery bookstore stock as well as a few other new offerings – the bookstore is slowly expanding, feel free to come back from time to time for new things!