Collections and Other Stuff I Like

I had forgotten to take pictures of the felt balls and cones I gave my grandnieces for Christmas and had asked my niece to send some photos if she had any. She sent these two the other day – the first time she had seen either of them play with the cones and the balls together.

Now I’m just waiting for them to make the ice cream cone connection!

Speaking of (or talking of as my oldest grandchild used to say) that piece of grass between the sidewalk and the road as I did in an earlier post, the ones on Michigan Avenue can get quite elaborate. This year I spotted one of my favorite Christmas images – a red truck hauling Christmas trees.

In another earlier post I wrote that there were no street murals in my neighborhood but it turns out I only had to walk another block further west.

And I did return to look at the unfinished mural Uptown. Based on what I had seen I just expected a beautiful quilt pattern but it turned out to be a much more complicated piece.

I had been thinking of other clothespin ornaments I could make with the 99 clothespins I had left over after buying a whole package to make one Anne of Green Gables ornament. Even though I had decided not to make a Wizard of Oz Dorothy clothespin ornament, I couldn’t help but think that the best way to make ruby slippers would be to dip the ends of the clothespin into glue and then into red glitter. I was also thinking about some ballerina ornaments I made many years ago. I had made their skirts out of doilies and I had dipped some of their heads in glitter rather than making embroidery floss hair. All these ideas and memories percolated in my head and Valentine girls emerged!

I dipped their heads and feet in red glitter and constructed their outfits from washi tape, ribbons, doilies, and tissue paper. Their pipe cleaner arms with bead hands hold traditional Valentine offerings. I constructed the cards and the candy box and just happened to have a tiny rose.

My valentines this year were also a result of brain percolation. At Christmas my Brooklyn niece and her husband were talking about their trip to Nashville and I had taken out the Hatch Show Print book to show them. It stayed on the coffee table and after awhile I picked it up and read it and looked at all the images of letterpress type. Then on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at the Children’s Museum, Derek led workshops on Pochoir which is using stencils to create posters and we offered stencils in several fonts or type. For our next session we introduced rubber stamp art and I was drawn to the huge basket of letter stamps of many different sets of alphabets. When I saw an image of a valentine with a typewriter and the phrase “You’re just my type” I knew what I wanted to do for my valentines. And of course I knew which candy went with them!

With almost all of the winter decorations back in the storage unit, we could incorporate the rest of our Christmas gifts. My sister gave me an enameled tray and two bowls and they inspired an entire rearrangement of the top of the sideboard.

The copper tray hosts the matching bowl and the two Turkish coffee pots from my parent’s basement. And it really shows off the small plate my Pennsylvania in-laws gave us a few years ago. The larger bowl from my sister which has a bronze outside and a beautiful green inside is going to sit in the middle of the dining room table (after the amaryllis from my Maryland in-laws is finished blooming) so the gourd basket (we bought it in Denver and it has graced the dining room table for around 50 years) with its round gourds (we acquired at some point) now sit on the left side of the sideboard. A perfect place for our youngest grandchild to access the round gourds that she likes to hide around the living room. (They are a stand in for the wooden Easter eggs that will appear on the sideboard in March.)

One of the things I buy for my husband are gargoyles so when I saw a wooden one at the Christkindlmarket I knew it would be the perfect Christmas gift. He ended up on the top of the white bookcases with the Matroyska dolls.

Alligators, turtles, and frogs are animals we gift each other and this year I got a bright green turtle from Guatemala in my stocking. He’s actually a magnet but I thought he should join his ilk on top of the CD shelves.

Looks like he is having a good conversation with that frog.

This year I noticed that several of the female characters on my children’s book and movie characters tree were redheads (even Madeline seems to be a redhead now). I also realized that the most important redhead was missing and I decided I needed an Anne of Green Gables ornament. I looked to see if there were any available online but then decided to make my own and ordered a package of clothespins instead. None of the ornaments and images of Anne online seemed quite right. Frankly the calico dresses with pinafores said Little House on the Prairie not Anne of Green Gables to me. I thought it was only right to give my Anne ornament the puffed sleeve dress that Matthew had Mrs. Lynde make as a Christmas present for Anne.

Anne took the dress and looked at it in reverent silence. Oh, how pretty it was – a lovely soft brown gloria with all the gloss of silk; a skirt with dainty frills and shirrings; a waist elaborately pin-tucked in the most fashionable way, with a little ruffle of filmy lace at the neck. But the sleeves – they were the crowning glory! Long elbow cuffs and above them two beautiful puffs divided by rows of shirring and bows of brown silk ribbon.

Quite an elaborate dress to recreate for a clothespin doll but I think I got a lot of the elements using brown grosgrain ribbon, some vintage brown seam binding, and a piece of lace I cut from a slip I never wear.

I decided my Anne needed the slippers Diana’s Aunt Josephine gave her that Christmas too.

Anne opened the box and peeped in. First a card with “For the Anne-girl and Merry Christmas” written on it; and then a pair of the daintiest little kid slippers, with beaded toes and satin bows and glistening buckles.

Again quite a lot of embellishments! I used ribbon to make the shoes and some straight pieces from a vintage hook and eye card to make the buckles which I threaded with ribbon to tie bows at the back. I looked up early 20th century “beaded toe slippers” and after trying a few searches found some images of fancy shoes with beaded flowers on the toes. So I made two white beaded flowers with a silver bead in the center. Then with her “carrot red” embroidery thread braids, Anne was ready to join Madeline, Pippi, and Anna on the tree.

That brunette peeking up is Dorothy from one of many illustrated versions of The Wizard of Oz. I also have the movie version of Dorothy otherwise I’d be tempted to make a Dorothy ornament with one of the 99 clothespins I have left!

I made my Chicago grandniblings some felted Christmas gifts but forgot to take pictures of them. My niece sent this picture the next day captioned “The elves are actually construction workers”.

When I told her I’d forgotten to take pictures of the elves or the tree I had actually made to go with the felted playmat I’d made him last year she sent another picture which shows another angle of the elves and the tree

So far I haven’t gotten any photos of the balls and cones I made for the twins. At the online Loose Parts summit I watched this year each segment began with an image of a bowl of felted balls and knowing how loved the felt balls I made last year were, I thought I’d make some felted balls for this year’s gift. Then I wondered if I should make another felted food gift instead to go with the pizza I gave them for their birthdays. Then I thought Aha – I could make some cones and the balls could be ice cream too. I wetfelted eight balls and then made 4 cones out of tan commercial felt. I sewed a waffle pattern on the felt before cutting, stiffening, and glueing the cones. I knew the gift was perfect when my daughter asked her cousin for gift ideas and my niece said, “Balls, all they like is balls.”

We’ve incorporated some of this year’s Christmas gifts into our gallery wall.

I found a wonderful skull painting to gift my husband when I went to the National Museum of Mexican Art to see the Day of the Dead Exhibition. It is unsigned but does have a Hecho in Mexico sticker. It fit perfectly above the masked doll in a space that was a bit too big for what had been there – a face or mask my husband had given me a few years ago. We moved that down to a space between the two gourd masks.

I also found another tin can vehicle for his stocking which meant a relocation of the smaller vehicle from a few years ago.

And I found a raffia giraffe in my stocking which was begging to hang out with the bicycle riding zebra.

The Elvis ornament picked out by my New York niece’s husband didn’t want to be on the gallery wall. He belonged on the side of the large CD shelves.

After we put away the winter decorations we can find homes for a few more Christmas gifts.

Deer have always been one of my favorite Christmas images so when my daughter found a red plaid deer at Target reminiscent of the Pottery Barn deer we got many years ago, she knew we each had to have one.

A lot of the deer got moved around this year to make some room for what has clearly become a new collection – wooden trees. I bought the flat trees on the left which are from India, several years ago from, I think, a TJ Maxx or Marshalls. I bought the tiered natural cone one on the right in the back from Marianos two years ago. Last year I bought the light wooden tree on the right at Target and this year I bought the similar one on the left from the Swedish Museum gift shop. This year I also bought the dark brown one on the right, which is also from India, at a TJ Maxx. The wooden houses from Hearth and Hand at Target have been sitting on the sideboard since I got them for Christmas the first year we moved to Chicago but this winter they moved over to be with the trees and will get put away with them when we put away the winter decorations at the end of January (which will help to make some room for new Christmas gifts on the sideboard)

I was fascinated by some mollinilla whisks when I saw them for the first time on a chocolate booth at a Farmer’s Market this summer. When I saw them again in the book “Loose Parts 4” as a suggestion for an authentic classroom item, I researched them and thought about buying one but didn’t. Then when I saw them at a Mexican import pop up downtown I was tempted again but when I saw they also had a toy version, I knew that that was what I really needed. It came with some other wooden kitchen pieces and since they had a hole in the top I was able to add screw eyes and some ribbon I found in a donated bag at the museum (which was too small to be useful for museum projects) to two of them – the first wooden utensils for my kitchen ornament collection.

My Birmingham niece who coincidentally gave my daughter a mollinillo whisk this year gave me an addition to my nativity collection from FeveCollector. The accompanying information states: “This mini hand-painted nativity imported from France is a merging of two French traditions – miniaturized nativities and feves.” Feves, it goes on to explain, are tiny figurines that are made to put in a King’s Cake for Epiphany or Three King’s Day (January 6). Originally actual beans (feve is French for bean) were put in the cakes and whoever found the bean was declared King for the day. In the 1800’s the beans were replaced with small porcelain figures which started a collecting craze which continues and feves are now made of porcelain, plastic, and metal and come in all kinds of designs “everything from Harry Potter and Disney to high fashion shoes and purses”. I love the tiny nativity and immediately found a place for it on top of the china cabinet fittingly in front of the African gourd nativity we bought at the Birmingham museum one of the times we went to Birmingham to celebrate Christmas at my niece’s.

So I think its official, here in Chicago I make large decorations for the dining/living room windows. This year I made the paper bag snowflakes that I started seeing on Instagram last year. I ordered white bags and found that 8 bags per snowflake was just right. Some people suggest 12 but I think that many would have a tendency to bunch even more at the bottom. And I can’t imagine how they cut through 12 bags at once. I found cutting through 8 difficult enough and made templates so I could cut each one separately and then glue them together.

I don’t really have a kitchen window anymore but I put a garland above the sink and imagine I do. I decorated the garland with snowflakes that were featured in the Sweet Paul magazine last winter. The directions were kind of minimal but I decided to use card stock and figured out how to stitch, with the embroidery thread and baker’s twine, so that they were neat on the back as well as the front. It was fun to come up with so many variations of the designs shown in the magazine.

The snowflakes like the rest of my decorations (except the tree which makes a much shorter appearance) were installed at the beginning of December and will stay up until the end of January.

I got this sign at a Marshalls this year and it seems prophetic since this was a very Gnome Noel. The first new gnome to make an appearance was one we bought on vacation in Sister Bay, Wisconsin this year at a Swedish store next to the Swedish restaurant with goats on the roof! It’s the gray one on the top shelf all the way on the right.

And then we bought the one third from the right at the Swedish museum gift shop here in Andersonville when we went to the Julmarknad at the museum. I bet that means Christmas Market – there were tables with homemade crafts and I bought two gnomes for the tree from one woman.

Then on Christmas I got two more gnomes – the gnome with a heart on his hat that my daughter bought at a Christmas store on the Wisconsin vacation.

And from my Birmingham niece this cute tree gnome she knitted.

There are lots of other gnomes to keep them company here!