Holiday Art and Crafts in the Studio

Looking around my place over the Christmas season you can sure see that I've been busy. I designed, carved and painted all of the Dala Horses. Here are a few of the hundreds I've made in the last few years.

The Christmas Stockings were made almost 20 years ago. I started by designing and sewing a patchwork fabric that I cut into the stocking shapes. before assembling the stockings I quilted the patchwork areas and did some embroidery. 

After getting them put together the finishing touches were to add the fabric yo yo's and buttons.

They're a great way to display and enjoy all of your favorite buttons or award pins and be able to enjoy them and at the end of the season you know that they're all stored safely.

Here I'd sewed the valances and trimmed the lamp shades. I'd also designed those thermal mugs with some of my artwork on them.

The tiny tree show's off some small wooden dala horse ornaments that I had designed, carved and painted. 

I used a kit to make the paper chains because my arthritis makes it hard for me to cut out all of the paper strips to make them with.

I've been making paper chains every year since I was a very little girl and it's still one of my favorite parts of holiday decorating.

It's not fancy here but it feels like a hug.

May Your Holidays Be Filled With All Of The Things That Make You Happy,
Julia 

Bird Cam Photos

The bird feeder that we bought with the built in camera is quite small so about the only nice photos we've gotten are of the chickadees.

I'm not quite sure what this was, no real way to tell except that it was larger and quite dark.

Here's the keeper of the feeder.

Believe it or not this is all we get of the cardinals.

Next season we'll be looking for a larger feeder or some way to adapt the camera so that it can get full shots of the bigger birds,

We have several species of woodpeckers that I'd love to be able to show you.

Interesting Experiments with Drawings and Paintings

It all started with this drawing from 1996. I'd never been too happy with it and it wasn't aging too well so I figured that I might as well play with it a bit.

I couldn't find my watercolors so I gabbed my acrylic paints and began adding those.

I found the early results promising so I continued adding other paints.

Looking back I think I should have stayed with the blue background.

I'm not quite sure why I went with the dark background except that I didn't like how the purple looked next to the blue.

I got carried away adding leaves and blades of grass which tilted the balance too far to the green.

I added more flowers to try to balance the colors a bit better.

I'm not sure how successful the finished painting was but I felt it was a useful exercise and it may work out yet. I plan to try it on a few products on Zazzle to see what it looks like in different shapes and sizes to see what happens.

Wish Me Luck