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Samantha's Christmas Bird

When my granddaughter was about a year and a half old and my daughter got out the Christmas decorations that year, she came across a couple of white felt beaded birds that I had made for her a number of years before she was married. Well, my granddaughter fell upon those two birds and played with them until the feathers fell out! Something about those birds just spoke to her.
And it was the same thing the next year when my daughter unpacked all the Christmas decorations. So I started making her new ones of different colors each year and she just loves these little birds.
My mother gave me the pattern. In about 1965 she made probably a dozen of these birds and she has had them on her tree ever since. I always liked them, hence my making them for my daughter probably 20 years ago now.
This bird is the 2010 edition of Samantha's Bird. I like to think that maybe someday they will hang on her Christmas tree and maybe another little girl in the family will love them, too.

What's Christmas without cookies?

Even though I have been dieting for a few months I still feel the need to bake cookies. I asked The Husby what kind he especially wants this year and he told me he didn't care if I didn't make any other kind than frosted sugar cookies. No problem! They're my favorite, too. Weird thing about frosted sugar cookies. My own mother never made them while I was growing up. Not ever. Not that I felt deprived, mind you. She made all kinds of date bars, fudge, divinity, cream wafers, and those buttery cookies that have to go through a press before baking. What are those things called, anyway?
But sugar cookies that were rolled out, cut out, baked and frosted with various colors of icing and then maybe topped off with colored sugars, dragees and other little pieces of ornament? No. I think because she didn't make these I formed the opinion that they were somewhat inferior to all other Christmas cookies. I tasted a few over the years and they were okay, but nothing prompted me to make my own until about 20 years ago a co-worker brought some to work that his wife had made. I remember cornering him and demanding the recipe, these cookies were that good. They have been the favorite holiday cookie ever since.
So even though I am making a few other holiday goodies, these sugar cookies are front and center. I mailed my daughter some the other day, too. Usually my granddaughter and I make them together at her house but this year, thanks to me being obliged to do MY CIVIC DUTY and be available for jury duty, I'm stuck here. But Christmas Eve I'm throwing off the chains of my diet and eating sugar cookies and having some egg nog while I watch "A Christmas Story" on the 24 hour marathon on TBS. Almost heaven, I'm tellin' ya.

He's the Man

The holiday season always tends to make me a bit nostalgic and yesterday my husband and I re-visited one of our favorite themes for Christmas. We got to reminiscing about how we found out that there was no Santa Claus. I think I may have exceeded the threshold for Santa believability. It wasn't until the springtime AFTER Christmas when I was in 3rd grade that I even got a whiff that Santa might not be real. I mean, I was nine years old at that point. I still remember the punch in the gut feeling when one of my blabbermouth school chums laid this tidbit on me.
My husband said he thinks the reason I went so long believing is because I just wanted to believe. I said, no, I absolutely had never even had a doubt. My parents and my older sister had me and my younger sister and brother completely reeled in on the Santa fantasy. And we loved it. Christmas Eve night we were beside ourselves with exitement. Santa, he was The Man. I swear, the only way my parents could have worked us into a higher state of bliss would have been to have someone outside the house shake some sleighbells. That would have just sent us over the top. We would never have slept!
Last year my then five year old granddaughter had a schoolmmate trying to insert herself into the fantasy by making fun of Santa. The nerve! So I managed to eke out another year of believability for my granddaughter by explaining in a very serious tone that kids who don't believe in Santa don't get a visit from Santa. I'm pretty sure that worked.
It's such a short time that kids get to believe in something. I wish I could go back to that myself. Christmas when you're a kid...good times.

Stuff I Did This Year

Wasn't it just last month that.....?

I feel like I'm in some kind of time warp these days, due largely to the dramatic change in weather last week. I could swear that a only a month ago we were enjoying fairly warm weather, hardly any leaves had fallen and I was still grilling chicken outdoors for The Husby. Then last week we had a huge windstorm and all of a sudden the trees were bare and then the temperatures dropped, it snowed, and I caught a cold. Just like that, we were in the dregs of winter. The result of all this has been that I am in the mood for Christmas this year way earlier than normal. So much so, in fact, that I was one of those nuts who braved the crowds and went shopping on Black Friday. I hadn't done that in 11 years if my memory serves me correctly. It wasn't quite as painful as I recalled but I probably won't do that again anytime soon. However, I did buy The Husby his gifts and usually I am wringing my hands in frustration over what to get him.
Today I am sticking around the house. I made date nut bars on Thanksgiving and sent a pan of them to work with The Husby this morning. They are pretty good but I need to get them out of my sight. The recipe is at one of my all time favorite food blogs The Homesick Texan

Sunday after the Show

There's no rest for the wicked today after the big craft show in Clarkston yesterday. Today is The Husby's birthday and tomorrow I have a date with Mr. Clean. After a couple of street fairs this summer I didn't have a lot of inventory left so I gave myself an assignment to create enough for the annual Pride of Clarkston Fine Arts Department Craft Fair. So I have been extremely busy for the past two months. I don't know what is more fun, making everything for the fair or being there in my booth. I always meet the nicest people there! I've already reserved my table for next year and I'll be in the same location as this year. The staff and the kids who volunteer at the show are phenomenal. If you have ever thought about entering a craft show, do this one. There were 160 vendors there this year and even though I didn't get the opportunity to see them all, this is a great craft show.
To all the people who stopped by my table and said such nice things, and my customers...thank you so much! I hope to see you next year!
After I finish a few special orders, get the house clean, pack away the Halloween decorations and do the laundry tomorrow I will be listing a lot of things on my Etsy store. I'm in a bit of a quandry about my Etsy store because I need to travel to San Diego right after Thanksgiving Day. I will be gone about a week and I hate to close the store for that long. The Husby says he will ship orders for me while I'm away but I'm a little nervous about that. I'm sure he can do that with no trouble but I like to be sure everything is in order when I ship. So I guess I will post a notice on my shop that I can't fulfill orders while I'm away.
I'd better get busy and get a birthday cake frosted and The Husby's gifts wrapped. Later....

The Last Rose of Summer

We have enjoyed glorious weather this month so I haven't groused as much as I normally do about impending winter. My roses are still in bloom but I imagine that is all about to change soon.
The craft show that I do every year in Clarkston is coming up in only three weeks so I have been working every day almost on new things. I have been trying to come up with the perfect tote bag but so far it has eluded me. I made a few little pillows and some business card holders. But jewelry and Christmas decorations will be the crux of my show again.
In the meantime I still am not eating meat. It has been two months and I haven't really missed it much, other than the other night when I was watching an episode of "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" and Guy was visiting a Jewish deli in Houston. They made the most mouth-watering corned beef sandwiches. I told my husband it's because of food like that that I can never be a true dedicated vegetarian. But in the meantime....
Everything else is good but time is flashing by and I can't believe that the holidays are already almost upon us. Good times, yeah.

Good-bye to Summer

I'm sure we will have plenty of warm days before Autumn sets in later this month but it has been very cool here lately. I was thinking back on everything I did this summer and one of the highlights was going to Mica Mountain in June. The Husby used to go bird hunting there as a kid and one time not long after we were married he took me there. I was rather impressed with how much mica was lying around on the ground. So I got this idea last year that we should go up there and take a look around again. We didn't get around to it until this year, and then once we got up on the mountain we couldn't find the site of the old mica mine. We took several wrong turns but finally found it. It looks almost nothing like what I remember. Of course, more than 25 years have gone by since I was there last and a lot of trees had grown up around the small clearing where the trucks used to load.
However, there is still a lot of mica on the ground and I had a lot of fun gathering together a bucket of it. I don't know for sure what I'm going to do with it. There is a lot of dirt sandwiched between the sheets of mica and I'm not really sure how to clean it. But it's still cool.

Print Shop? I don't need no stinkin' print shop!

A box of blank business cards bought at a yard sale? 50 cents.
An old typewriter bought at a yard sale. $1.00
A rubber stamp. $4.95
Your own handmade business cards. Priceless.

Day Six

Today marks six days since I've eaten meat. A lot of different things have contributed to me making the decision to try to go meatless. Not the least of which is my doctor telling me my cholesterol level is getting high. I hate having to take medication so I'm trying to control it with diet. I have been flirting with the idea of being vegetarian for a long time and have been cutting back on meat consumption all summer, so the past few days have not been a struggle at all. I'm buying Alicia Silverstone's book "The Kind Diet". I saw her on television recently and the recipes she describes sound really good. Tonight I am making a fantastic baked potato, onion, pepper and squash dish I had in Wyoming last weekend. I'm also making chicken for my husband. He isn't on board with going vegetarian and that's okay with me.
Here's a Mark Twain quotation I found today that I think is kind of cool.
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Trying to Play Catch Up

I need a new year's resolution to keep up this blog better. The last few months have been a whirl what with yard-saling, going back and forth to North Dakota and California, gardening, and spending oodles of time in my studio.
My family also celebrated my big sissy's 50th wedding anniversary with the love of her life. It was almost a little overwhelming so many people attended. We had family members and friends from Canada, Texas, Scotland, California, Montana and Wyoming there, about 100 in all. My nephew and his girls did an outrageously good job cooking a ton of fabulous food and worked overtime making sure we were all happy and well fed. I didn't think it was possible for a party to surpass the one my sister and her husband threw for new year's eve in 1974, but I think this one did it.
I've been on the run ever since we got home Monday making jewelry and things for Hot August Nights downtown on Saturday. Anita at Simple Reflections
was kind enough to extend to me and some other artisans a table in front of her store and we're hoping to sell, sell, sell.
If you don't catch us this weekend, we will be back for the Lewiston Roundup Parade in two weeks.

Fairy Gold

Yesterday I was at my kinda/sorta real job and driving back to work after a break when I saw a huge yard sale in progress. I couldn't pass it up as I remembered I had been at the same house about a year ago and it had lots of neat stuff! Imagine my swoon when I found a box of old German books printed in a Gothic alphabet. And there was this, only the front cover and first two pages of a book titled "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines". There is no publishing date but it appears it was published in London by J.M. Dent & Co. I scrounged for quite awhile hoping to find the remainder of the book but no luck. But this page is gold! Feel free to copy.

Download This!

My daughter and I bought a pile of old books at a yard sale recently. This image is from Songs for Life's Journey. There is no publishing date in the book and only says it was published by E.P Dutton & Co. in New York City. My guess is the book is at least 100 years old. It is chock full of beautiful color illustrations like this one and I'll be adding them here so stay tuned.

Do photos steal your soul?

When I lived in Kosovo I literally took thousands of photographs. I was warned that the Roma population there did not like to be photographed because of the belief that it stole their souls. Naturally, I scoffed at that notion but I did respect their wishes. I did get a few photos of some Gypsy children one time when they posed for the camera. Their mothers were present and they didn't object.
A couple of weeks ago I was visiting my mother and we went through a ton of old photos. Going through these was a big treat when I was growing up. About once a year or so, maybe on a rainy day or something, one of us would say, "Let's look at pictures!" and we would scramble to get out the small black trunk my parents used to store them in. And we would go through them and laugh at the old fashioned hair styles, the old cars, the hopelessly outdated dresses and so on.
It had been quite a few years since I had seen some of these photos because my mother has been on a scrapbooking venture for quite awhile and has been rather secretive about her project. Whenever we asked to see these old photos she was a little vague.
So on my recent visit I asked to see them again and she dug some out. Included in the prints was a pile of negatives. So we held to the light a bunch of them and I could see that there was a virtual treasure trove in them. I asked if I could take them home to scan and she let me borrow them.
The night I arrived home I started in scanning them and I was amazed at how many of them I have no recollection of ever seeing before. That includes this one that I am posting here. This is me and my Sissy in about 1952. I uploaded the scanned negative into Photoshop and then inverted the image. I'm telling you, I got a lump in my throat the second I saw it. This was such a special time in our lives. We were so happy in that house in Ft. Collins. Another sister and a brother were born during the time we lived in there. And my big sister was just "IT" for me. I probably drove her crazy. I remember one time I was allowed to walk to the city bus stop with her which was about half a block from our house. She had plans that did not include me and I was bereft at the thought of her leaving. I cried and clung to her so long that the bus driver finally gave up on her, shut the door and drove off. But she didn't even complain to me and my tears dried up before we even got home. What a brat I was.
But that picture just says it all. I swear, looking at it, it is just like being there again. And I could swear that some part of our souls are in that image.

Cece

When I was at my daughter's house for Christmas I had the opportunity to photograph my old stuffed dog Cece. I got him when I was 2 years old and he was given to me to cheer me up after I got a couple of fingers smashed in the car door. My grandmother and two aunts had come to visit us from Texas and apparently, in my excitement to go for a car ride with them I forgot to get my fingers out of the way. There was a cartoon at the time called Beany and Cecil and I named my new dog after Cecil. Only I couldn't really pronounce Cecil and it evolved into Cece.
Cece kept me company God only knows how many hours over the years. He soaked up at least a gallon of tears through my childhood. He always had a comfy place to lie on my bed even after I was grown.
When I had my daughter she got to keep Cece and when she moved away from home Cece went with her. Now I have a granddaughter who has adopted Cece.
Poor old Cece has been sewn up and a new nose attached and his fur has about all fallen off but he's still intact. With any luck, he'll be a companion to another little girl someday in the future.

I Had All These Big Plans, See?

It was huge, my plans to update my posts last month. I was going to post a photo of my Christmas tree which I admit I just took down about three days ago. And I was going to show you how I upcycled some metal lids from my cans of coffee and made Christmas ornaments. Tons of fun! And I baked stuff for Christmas and traveled to California and didn't leave until three days after I had planned. That was all good, though. I got to spend much more time with my granddaughter and we had a lot of laughs with everyone over the goofy can of "Pranks" that we bought at Restoration Hardware as a gift to my son-in-law. Oh, yeah...Whoopee cushions, Bubba teeth, a Joy Buzzer, X-ray glasses...straight out of the back cover of 1960's comic books.
I've been busier than ever since I got home three weeks ago.
And...drumroll, please. I made a number of sales on my Etsy store. I was very excited. The first few orders I had the bracelets in stock. But then all of a sudden, I got orders for ones I hadn't replaced after the big craft show in Clarkston. So there I was out in the Flower House soldering away and it was so cold out there I could see my breath. But who's complaining? Not me.
I've been making a couple of journals and applying myself to really, really learning Photoshop CS3. I've just been playing with it heretofore. The Husby gave me a new gadget for my birthday, too. It scans 35mm negatives and slides and converts the negatives to positive images. I fished out several old (as in early 1970's) strips of negatives and was surprised to see some images I haven't seen in many, many years. My daughter was 5 and 6 years old in these photos. The color on them is kind of funky as they were taken originally in Fuji film and that film always made the colors kind of "off". I used to like that, but now it looks weird. This is where the uptick in my CS3 interest came into play.
I got out an old quilt that I sort of inherited about 35 years ago. I have worked on it off and on over the years. It was fun going through all the pieces and I have sort of marveled at how much I have actually done. I know, over 35 years I should have completed it decades ago, but it's just one of those things.
Today I started making some things for my Etsy store which I hope to have up by the end of the week.
And that's where I am right now.