Happy New Year

This morning, working with New York Times magazine pages and my favorite color …. blue, I finished this piece in my collage journal.  The rest of the day I spent putting a bit of Christmas away getting ready to have a few friends in tonight... It is New Year/s Eve after all.

One of the things I did to get ready was make a special cracker spread... the one I watched my dad concoct one night while we were out to dinner.  Waiting for the meal he asked the waiter to bring him some Roquefort Cheese, a glass of Harveys Bristol Cream, some crackers and one of their soup cups... empty..  There was butter on the table.  With everything assembled he proceeded to mix up a delightful spread for those crackers.  It was the first time I'd seen him do it but it was also the first time I had been with him in a restaurant when I was old enough to drink.  Mother said he did it often when they were out without us kids.

Now I'm sitting with a glass of wine, looking at all of the ornaments on our Christmas Tree and remembering …  So many years and so many good memories.  Yes, there are a few not so good ones too but tonight I'm concentrating only on the good ones.  As my 79th year comes to an end and I look forward to my 80th why think about the not so good... there are way to many good ones to think about.  And most of them are represented in one way or another on our Christmas Tree.

I have ornaments from my childhood and several collected or given to me through the years.  I still have the first ornaments I bought for the first tree I had in my very first home away from my parents home.  At one time I did two trees, one was a designed tree, the kind that decorators and artists do, the other was like this one... just a lot of special ornaments that have been collected through the years.  And for the last few years the main decorator has been our grandson.  He would decide which ornaments went where... all my angel ornaments went in the back or up high because he didn't like angels.  This year he changed his mind, still not his favorite but okay to be spread out around the tree.

My life has been good, I am feeling blessed as I look forward to 2019.

 I wish you all a very Happy and Joy filled New Year

A Collage Journal

I bought a few sketchbooks, mostly hand book and Strathmore visual journals, to be ready for 2019. I also bought one that was new to me and when it arrived I found the paper was grey and more like construction paper than drawing paper. I set it aside thinking I would send it back but in the mess of Christmas wrapping and piles of clutter, I lost the shipping papers. 

Since I'm beginning to play with collage I decided this journal would work just fine for that. I'm also playing with tack down collage which I find to be less messy. Papers and substrate are prepared ahead with polymer varnish, then an iron glues everything in place. 

Our Family Christmas celebrations happened on the weekend so yesterday was quiet here and there were some scraps of prepared paper on my work table and I had already prepped a couple of pages in the journal.  This is the first collage in the new Collage Journal. I'm feeling so so about it but this is a place to practice after all, not working for a masterpiece here.

Merry Christmas

The Christmas Bird and he was my mother's favorite.  I didn't paint him because of the season; however, it seems appropriate to use him as my Christmas wish to all of you.

Wishing all of you A Merry Christmas & A Joy Filled 2019

Getting Ready

The Gingerbread House is finished.  I put the house together, our grandson does the decorating.  The first thing he did was add a chimney.  "How is Santa going to get in without a chimney?"  He had been telling me we need to do this since before Thanksgiving and he reminded me that he is bigger now so we need a bigger Gingerbread House.  So, it's bigger than the 5 or is it 6 previous ones.  It's one of our Christmas traditions.

I have to admit, I cheat, I bought a kit.  Baking is not my thing, my son was deprived growing up, the only time he got cookies was when Grandma Percy came or we went to Grandma Lystra's.  They both baked and there were always cookies when they were around. Since Grandma's are suppose to provide cookies, I buy them for our grandson.  I really should learn to bake, it isn't too late.

I did a gingerbread house for our son once.  Mother was visiting so she did the backing, I put the parts together.  It was a very elaborate Queen Anne complete with wrap around porch.  I wouldn't let Marshall eat any of it.  It was beautiful but, of course, didn't last.  Never did another one until I found the kits for Warner.

I've also been working on other decorating but going slow.  The tree is up and the lights are on it but no decorations.  The nativity Ed's brother gave us is up and so are my angels in the clouds.  Ed's brother is a florist and he sent me some fake snow he had used to build a life size snowman.  Well, life size snowman is going to take more time that I have unless Dick comes north and gives me some instruction.  (He lives in Florida)  In the meantime, I found that it is a great way to revive very old worn out ornaments and the went nicely with my angels in the clouds.  These ornaments are about 40 years old but the snow makes them almost like new.

Our grandson is usually here on Wednesday evenings so that may be when the decorations go on the tree.  He's here mornings before the bus too so we may get started tomorrow morning.

Did I mention, I love Christmas!

Stones, Birch Trees and Dolls

Another Cairn with a couple of stones and two birch trees.  A strange combination, at least the way I have them on the pages.  I paint with a group on Tuesday mornings.  I'm sure I've mentioned them before, last week they wanted to know how to do the stones I had been doing so those on the right were the lesson.  The page already had the trees, another lesson awhile back, and the paint along the bottom. One of the artists wondered what would happen if she used this technique over stones that had already been painted and were boring.  So, I did a couple over the painted strip and it worked fine.  Yes, on mine you can see the line but that wouldn't happen on her rocks because they had been painted completely.

Since we can't always get outside, some weeks I take along things to paint.  One week I took a few of my dolls, some made by me, one a gift to me from a friend.  I did the full doll first, then chose to just paint their faces... here are the pages I did them on. The one with black hair was the gift doll.  The owl is actually white fabric but I kept getting the tint wrong so finally just gave up and left her green.
I do have a few more dolls, have to fill those other two spaces.

I don't consider myself a dollmaker though I do enjoy making them every once in awhile.  Guess I'm recovering something missed in my childhood.  I don't remember playing with dolls that much then.