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 

Holiday for the worktable

 I'm sure this doesn't look like much to most people but the candle ring is from my sister in law,the fabric was from my Mom and the imari pattern china is from the very first set of dishes I ever picked out back in the 1970's. Of course guys don't generally like to use tiny teacups so the mug is from our product line at Zazzle. The image on it is from a Christmas stocking I made about 20 years ago. These are the things that make it special to us.

I was surprised to discover that almost all of the thread I have left around here is heavy hand quilting thread so the sewing machine wasn't an option which of course explains why I was only able to hem the table topper in time for Christmas. In the background you can see that there's a LOT more of this fabric I can do things with for next year. I think it's time to ask Mom "what were you thinking?" and see if she'd still like to have any of the things she wanted to make. I'll do that today before I make any plans for the rest of it.

As you can see, most of my projects didn't go very far but it helped to make that list and set some priorities for them so I'll tackle the most important ones first when I get back to work
.

In the meantime I plan to enjoy things, how about you?

Scrap Crafted Cards

Believe it or not this is (or was) my living room. I just tell people "the creeping craft monster ate my house" and we all have a good laugh.

I'm making progress through that scrap pile and several of these will be going out in today's mail so that makes everyone happy...except of course my husband who is always tripping over my trails of paper bits and misc. craft supplies strung around the house.

Crazy Christmas Ideas

 We threw our Christmas Stockings into the scanner so that we can see what all of the patchwork, embroidery and bead work that I did all of those years ago will look like on products at Zazzle.

 How's this for a green Christmas idea? It's fun to see the things you love in new ways, it's my favorite way to recycle this season and I'm hoping that everyone else will love it too.

Believe it or not that "quarter" is really a button, we thought it might bring us luck. One of my sisters made all of the little plastic charms so this whole project is full of positive energy and good wishes-no wonder it makes me feel good.