At Christmas my sister, a master of close ups, took pictures of two of my window suns. Both of these were given to me many years ago by my parents. You can catch a glimpse of my Christmas window decorations (feathers and beads).
We finally got our Spring tree up this year. We like to force a live branch and my husband had been clipping one from one of the apple trees at his work. But the trees did not fare well this winter so we cut off the top of a very young tree we found by the side of the road. We don’t know what kind it is and we are hoping it is not the same as one we had a few years ago which produced some very messy droopy things.
In the upper left hand corner of this picture you can see the maple syrup bucket I crafted using a metal pail and the top of a metal birdhouse. You probably can’t see the other maple syrup ornaments (they were refrigerator magnets) – an old wooden bucket and a maple leaf with a painting of a sugar house. Other decorations include:
Green Mardi Gras beads
Shamrocks
Eggs
Rabbits
Chicks
A Kokopelli
Frogs
Insects
A Baseball Glove
A Joker Playing Card for April Fools Day
A Kite
A Bird’s Nest and some Birdhouses
A Beehive
A new addition this year are the brightly colored feathers at the end of some branches. These are in honor of the Swedish Easter trees called Paskris which traditionally sport feathers, eggs, paper roosters, yarn ball chickens, crocheted catkins (which apparently look like hotdogs) and pipe cleaner witches. I found out about Paskris when I pinned a tree from Aunt Peaches on my pinterest board “fall and spring trees”. http://www.auntpeaches.com.
I found more info on Paskris trees on http://www.aswedeinthekitchen.com. I also found and downloaded a picture of a Paskris that included a witch on the deviant art website.
After pinning a few examples of needle felted eggs on my pinterest boards I decided rather than making and pinning a card that said “I used to make things but now I just pin things other people have made”, I should make some felted eggs. I was trying to figure out how I was going to make the designs when I
remembered the egg stencils I bought a few years ago. I had never used them so I’m so glad I still had them.
My husband gave me an incredible book about the amazing designer Alexander Girard for Christmas this year and I have been dipping into it since then. In one of my earliest posts I wrote about his folk art collection but apparently he did not like to be called a collector. “Somewhere here we are going to wind up using the word collector and I want to say immediately that I don’t care for the word at all. I don’t really know what I could call it. It is more a matter of selecting then collecting. And yet a selector sounds like something on a kitchen appliance” he said at some point in the 1950’s.
I started our Spring decorating today by hanging the garden tool ornaments in the kitchen and arranging little vignettes of decorative eggs around the living room. Then we made our annual trip to a sugar house for corn fritters with maple syrup. We always go to the South Face Farm in Ashfield because it is open till 3:00 so we go late and we don’t have to wait.
The sign explains that it was too cold yesterday to boil today so we stopped at Paul’s Sugar House on the way back.
As I wrote in one of my earliest posts, I have been collecting suns since I was a teenager. Most of the suns that are hanging in my house now were gifts – collectors are so easy to buy for! Here is a shot of my dining area suns:
I have been writing to click on the picture to see the whole image because when I check published version on my computer only a portion of the picture shows up. I noticed the other day however that the WordPress ap on my phone shows the whole image, so I guess I’ll say click if the image seems incomplete!
My downstairs bathroom features suns as well:
“Some people do it for the thrill of the hunt. Some do it as an investment. Some do it to connect to an earlier place and time. Why do I collect everything from handcrafted pyrography (burned wood items) and blue and white Danish plates to Christmas ornaments (I lost count
at 850) and big-letter postcards? I only know I can’t stop myself” Ann Omvig Maine editor of Traditional Home in latest issue.
As a collector, I like to keep stuff once I get it. Sometimes people suggest that in order to make room for new stuff one should get rid of the old. What ????? I don’t even like to throw my socks away. Last weekend I spent Sunday morning darning a pile of my socks that had big toe holes (I seem to have a wicked sharp big toe nail – and I’m not just using the adjective wicked because I live in Massachusetts). Many of the socks had been sitting in the darning pile for quite a while and it so good to see them on my feet again this week!
My husband is an expert at gluing our breakable things back together if they drop or get knocked over by cats who are being chased. Recently he has had to glue this wonderful turtle together twice. Without actively collecting them, my husband has amassed quite a turtle and frog collection. The truth is I collect them for him. This turtle though was a present from our older daughter. We also inherited the running cat from her.
The basement stairway wall hosts our latest collection – music posters from the some of the shows we attend. There are two rules for this collection – we have to have gone to the show and I have to find the posters visually appealing. Several years ago, my brother in law gave us a very large poster of Robert Johnson – one of those gifts that sound good to the giver (my brother likes blues so he’d like this) but that it is hard for the receiver to know what to do with. I know we’ve given him quite a few gifts like this too! Anyway, we hung the poster on the wall going down to the basement. Sometime later while buying tickets to a show, I saw a box of posters from previous shows that were there for the taking. I brought home one from my favorite band (The Hot Club of Cowtown) and hung it next to the Robert Johnson poster. Then I snagged a poster from the bathroom at another show and a new collection began!
Now that the daffodils are poking up through the snow and Spring is just around the corner, it was time this weekend to take down the last remaining winter decorations. I like to have a few weeks with no decorations before the new ones are installed, so down came the doves and feathers from the living room window and the glass drops and gold stars from the dining nook. In the kitchen we took down the heart garland and the small Danish inspired stars I made this year. It is always sad to take down the miniature cooking utensils.
They hang below the kitchen cabinets from November through the end of February. Soon they will be replaced by the gardening ornaments which hang from the middle of March through the summer. Here is one more shot of some of the cooking ones.
Collections and Other Stuff I Like 