For my Valentine’s treats, I decided to continue with the tarot theme I used for Halloween, but I didn’t want to give friends and acquaintances the lovers card, so I googled tarot card for friendship and found the Three of Cups.
I attached them to three Dove milk chocolate hearts and wrote “To Friendship” on the back.
I’ve been making hanging Valentine’s cards for over 20 years, so there are a lot now, and since I’ve also been making and buying ornaments, the kitchen garland was getting pretty crowded. I decided to hang the hanging heart cards separately this year. I attached them with tiny clothespin to some Be Mine ribbon tape and hung them in the windows.
(I gave my husband the m&m characters to arrange, and this was how he placed them!)
And here’s the garland. It sports two new hearts – a wooden one with a red ribbon which we bought in Door County three years ago and which has been lying forgotten in a drawer since (top left) and a purple glass one I bought at a flower shop downtown this year (top middle above the arrow). Since all the paper hearts are hanging in the window, we had room to bring back some of the older ornaments, too.
On Instagram recently, Brittany from the House That Lars Built demonstrated how to make a Victorian folding valentine, and I decided I wanted to make some too. I couldn’t figure out how to make one from her directions, but I did some googling, and after watching several YouTube videos, I finally figured it out. I decorated them with stamps and colored pencils.
Here are some photos I took at the beginning of the process before I bought some new ink. Unfortunately, if I used regular copy paper, the stamps were visible on the other side of the paper. I made several trips to Michael’s to buy paper that was slightly thicker but kept buying paper that wasn’t what I needed. I finally found some at the children’s museum, but using thicker paper made the folding more challenging. While I was never fully satisfied with any of them, it was fun to make and share them with family anyway!
I had been holding off on this present incorporation post because my daughter gave me a beautiful sun vase, and I wasn’t quite ready to incorporate it yet. But I realized I wanted to keep the winter vase arrangement out for Valentine’s Day and through February, so I should go ahead and write about incorporating our other presents.
My husband gave me the red guy in the middle this year after purchasing him in Saugatuck this summer. Of course, he had to join the one to the left, who is also from Saugatuck and the one on the right we bought in Brattleboro. They were all made in Guatemala. I always thought of the yellow one which we bought first as more Zombie like than skeleton like, but the store in Saugatuck labeled the white one as a skeleton. Whichever, they look like they are planning something! Placing them together meant moving some other things around, and this is how that section of the gallery wall looks now.
My Birmingham niece gave me a mermaid that joined some similar ones hanging above the mirror in the bathroom.
She’s the one on the right. I love how the lights make her glow!
My quilting sister in law became interested in Barn Quilts this year. While painting quilt squares on barns seems like a traditional craft (and some websites assert that it is – perhaps mixing them up with hex signs as I originally did), they are actually a more recent trend. The first one was created in 2001 by a woman named Donna Sue Groves to honor her mother, a quilter. She then collaborated with the Ohio Arts Council to create 20 more barn quilts, and the Barn Quilt Trail was born. There are now Barn Quilt Trails (a collection of barn quilts within driving distance of each other) in all 48 states as well as in Canada.
Barn Quilts are usually based on traditional quilt patterns – one square is painted on plywood or composite aluminum and attached to the barn. My quilting sister in law has given us several quilts over the years, including an incredible red and white piece to commemorate our 20th wedding anniversary. This year, with her new interest in Barn Quilts, she gave us a wooden red and white Ohio Star Barn Quilt ornament. I decided to hang it year round in the hall near the anniversary quilt and the pictures of her and my husband’s family.
While it’s hard to see in a picture, I like the way its star points relate or speak to the points of the oil drum sun at the end of the hall as well.
This year’s living and dining room decorations are snowflakes made of 16″ doilies. They are a variation of the paper bag snowflakes I made a few years ago. I found the directions on an Instagram account @woodlark.
The kitchen garland is full of elves!
I found the vintage Santa elf at a store in Andersonville and he inspired me to make some elves out of pipe cleaners and vintage elf faces like the Halloween cats and pumpkins I learned to make from a Martha Stewart Living magazine a long time ago.
After I hung them all up, I realized they needed pom poms for their hats, so I took them down one by one to add those.
As soon as an ad for the Dala horse on the right popped up on Instagram, we made a trip to World Market to buy him. He’ll actually stay on the shelf year round even after those gnomes are gone.
While we were at World Market, we also bought a little red mixer to add to the kitchen ornaments.
While we have elves in the kitchen, we have gnomes on the shelves. On the left of the top shelf is a new gnome that my friend Jen sent from Northampton. The gnome on a pile of books that I won at Rushmer Christmas last year fits perfectly in front of the bookend that is usually on the second shelf from the bottom. On the right of the top shelf is a new tiny painted branch gnome I bought at Neighborly in Lincoln Square.
I bought the large one on the left at a craft fair in Northampton many years ago. One of my granddaughters made the middle one at Breakfast with Tomten at the Swedish museum several years ago. We’ve never been to Breakfast with Tomten, but when we went to see the St. Lucia procession in Andersonville, we parked in front of a store called Vase and Vessel. We stopped in on our way back to the car and bought a wooden tree for our newest Christmas collection. At first, I was afraid it was too small, but I loved its shape and the dark color and grain of the wood, and it turned out to be the perfect addition.
With gnomes on the shelves, wooden trees on the CD case, and all the rest of the decorations in their usual places, we are all cozy for this month and next!
Yes, time to put away those Fall leaf fairies but it’s also the time of year when instead of finding presents for others, I find more for myself! On my first Christmas shopping trip in Andersonville, I found another wooden mushroom that I couldn’t resist. It was at the front of a store with many handcrafted booth spaces, but there was no information about it. Somehow, I think it ties all the other mushrooms together!
And then, on my shopping trip to Lincoln Square, I found this resin mushroom. Since at this point, I had packed up all the Fall decorations, I added it to the top of the bin and took this photograph, which doesn’t do it justice at all. I’m really looking forward to seeing it and photographing it hanging on the Fall branches next year.
And now, onto the Christmas/Winter decorating and finding gifts for other people!
I recently found two murals by the same artist on Roscoe between Broadway and Halstead.
And then one day I came across an artist painting a huge new mural on Melrose right off Broadway.
It took a week or so but it’s completed now.
It’s kind of cool the way the shadows of the fire escape and the street lamps and signs become a part of the underwater fantasy.
I started my Fall decorating this year by making some felt sunflowers.
I used all my felting skills – I cut the flowers from commercial felt and hot glued them together, wet felted the stems, and needle felted the part of the stem that attaches to the flower (which I attached with hot glue).
Last year I made a peg doll of Wirt from the “Over the Garden Wall” series, and I’ve been looking for a little teapot so I could make his stepbrother Gregory. I finally found one, and I also found some pegdoll gnomes that I thought would work well for his body. I just had to cut off a bit of the hat of one of them. Watching the shows may be a new Fall tradition – we watched it with our youngest grandchild in between making Fall sugar cookies when she came over one day.
For the most part, we decorated the way we have for the past few years, but we added a few things. We found this Mazatl at Target. According to the tag, he’s part of the Dia de Muertos Collection designed with Luis Pinto. A little googling led to the discovery that mazatl “means deer and is the day in the Aztec calendar associated with the God Tialoc. Tialoc is the God of rain and thunderstorms and is associated with fertility, floods, drought, and wrath. Mazatl is a good day for hunting, a bad day to be hunted.” https://symbolikan.com
The website https://azteccalendar.com lists some celebrities who were born on the day Mazatl and they were not born on the same day or even the same month on our calendar and I found no reference to the Day of the Dead so I’m not sure there is an actual connection to the Day of the Dead but I like him with this doll my Birmingham niece made.
We purchased a mushroom at World Market that I almost bought last year but I thought it might be too big. It didn’t seem so big anymore now that we have the mushroom we got last Christmas. The mushrooms have been here all year, but I added the leaf fairies I made many years ago for Fall.
Last year, when I wasn’t buying the mushroom, I did buy another of the World Market little houses. The part at the bottom that holds the batteries looks a lot better now after I painted it black.
I created a little scene on top of the small mission book case and gave them one of those large lawn skeletons everyone on Instagram has. I also hung the skeleton I had printed out a few years ago above the scene.
I participated in the Stitchtober challenge again this year. Last year, I had the idea that tarot cards might work with the prompts, and I was really hoping they would after I found the Expanded Celtic Cross spread that uses 13 cards. When I saw the prompts, I knew they would work, so I searched for simplified designs and sketched out the cards. I thought that would be more difficult than it was, but what actually turned out to be difficult was the stitching. I had been surprised when I first started embroidering again that I wasn’t having the problem with tension I had had in the past but after several pieces I must have gotten complacent because it took me a little while to realize my cards were shrinking and the fabric was puckering. I kept going, though, and decided it looked like the tarot spread was on a wrinkled tablecloth. So I crafted a little crystal ball (out of an ornament and my Alexander Girard washi tape) and a candleholder (out of beads and a birthday cake candle) to sit on the table (actually a plant stand).
Since I was immersed in tarot cards, I found one to use for my treats. I wrote “To New Beginnings” on the back so people wouldn’t get upset that I was giving them the death card.
I thought I was done with Fall crafting but then I got the idea to needle felt some mushrooms for the branches.
I’m so glad we don’t rush Christmas and get to enjoy our Fall decorating for another month!
We went to the Howard Street Chalk Festival again this year. This festival features four of the type of 3D Chalk art that only work if you look at it through a phone camera. Here’s one that looks like it could be a trompe l’oile piece.
But here’s what it looks like from the side without the camera.
This one was really fun.
The mermaid was a bit less successful.
The pinata looked like it was jumping. The shadows under its feet are chalk. The other shadows are actual people shadows.
There were some 2D pieces by guest artists, too, as well as ones done by people who had purchased squares, but I didn’t take any pictures of them.
A few weeks later. we went to another chalk festival the I Madonnari Street Painting Festival at the Sutherland Elementary School. It is modeled after a festival of the same name which has been hosted by the Children’s Creative Project in Santa Barbara County, California since 1987. Madonnari Street painting is an Italian tradition believed to have started in the 16th century; the word “Madonnari” is used because Italian street painters would often reproduce the image of the Madonna, St. Mary.
The festival features the work of professional artists as well as the creations of students and amateur artists who are invited to purchase a sidewalk square and decorate it with pastel chalks. Proceeds benefit the Sutherland Parent Teacher Association (PTA).
This year, Liz, who I work with at the Chicago Children’s Museum, was one of the guest artists.
Some of the other guest artists were still hard at work.
When we first got there, this one featured a large mushroom but then a little bunny started appearing and we realized it was the cover of the Richard Scarry book “I am a Bunny”.
The school takes up one large block, and people were drawing on the sidewalk around the whole building – there were so many wonderful drawings!
They get sprayed with floor wax when they are done, which must preserve them for a long time because on the few squares that were not being done this year, we could see some ghost images.
I wrote about the Nettlehorst Little Free Library before and mentioned that it was not visually distinctive, so I was pleasantly surprised today to see that it had been replaced with this beautiful one. Beautiful on both sides too.
There is a flock of chickens around the corner at the school, so I’m guessing that is why this side sports this attractive one!
The book selection varies greatly here. Today I was lucky to find a Kate Atkinson book I haven’t read yet.
This summer, we helped to take care of a neighbor’s cat while she went back to France for the summer. While we were standing in her kitchen as she went over the details, I noticed some cups with figures that looked similar to those on my Quimper pottery. Although I’m pretty sure I was saying Quimper correctly (kam-pair) she did not know what I was talking about but when I googled it to show her she said excitingly “Bretagne yes that’s where I’m from!”
I never really set out to collect Quimper pottery, but because I loved some blue and orange bowls from Spain that my grandmother had given us, my parents gave me her blue and orange Quimper dishes when she died.
The sugar bowl has what I now know is called a “petite breton”. According to the website frenchaffaires.com, Quimper has been the center of faience or pottery production in France for over 300 years and “the folk aspect of Quimper pottery intensified when regional costumes became popular across Europe in the late 1800’s. In the 1860’s, the familiar figure of the “petit breton” wearing sabots (wooden clogs), embroidered skirts or vests with hats or coifs (a woman’s hat) was first depicted on the pottery.”
Since my parents were giving me the dishes, they also gave me a stack of small plates.
And then, of course, my collection expanded (as collections do) when my sister gave me some pieces she bought at auctions.
I realized that all my pieces only show a woman, unlike my neighbor’s cups, although I also have a metal tray with a Quimper image of both a man and a woman that my sister gave me. (Well, actually, I gave it to her, but then she gave it back it to me thinking that I had given it to my mother and she had somehow ended up with it)
And now I have two more examples as my neighbor returned from France with gifts. She gave us the same things she gave all the cat helpers, including some wonderful buttery cookies in a tin.
And because I had mentioned my collection she gave us each a mug with an attached spoon. Mine features a “petit breton” couple!
My husband’s features a new image, but one that I think is also very French!
Of course, some rearranging of the China cabinet was necessary!
We stopped by St.Louis on our way to visit my Missouri (formerly Chicago) niece. I knew St. Louis had an arch but I didn’t know anything about it so I was surprised to find out it was designed by Saarinen, the tulip table guy, and that Alexander Girard was part of the design team.
Our main reason for stopping in St. Louis was to go to the amazing City Museum. It is hard to even describe how much is going on there – incredible climbing structures, salvaged building elements, artistic creations, and even the largest pencil in the world. Of course, I took pictures of some of the mermaids.
I didn’t take any pictures of the architectural elements, but I had to snap a picture of Big Boy since I used to work at a Big Boy restaurant and even dressed up as him for Halloween once.
The room with the largest pencil also included a pencil collection.
I didn’t do much climbing, but I did venture into the school bus that was sticking out of the top of the building.
We also found ourselves at Union Station where there were some hungry koi fish and a heron.
There are many more sights in St. Louis that I’d like to see, so I think we need to plan another trip.
Collections and Other Stuff I Like 