Happy 2013!

 

First of all, I have been absent from "Blogland" for several weeks, mostly because life got really busy and because I was trying to evaluate whether blogging is still a good use of my time and energy.  I really considered calling it quits, but when I logged back on and started reading blog posts from my contacts, it made me want to keep it up.  It is a good creative discipline and a creative connection as well.

This tree represents my current word for 2013:  Breathe.  I say current because I usually fall off the word bandwagon after the first six weeks, and then when I revisit it in December I wonder what in the world I was thinking by choosing the particular word that I did.  But today I know that taking time to breathe (physically, spiritually and emotionally) is important for me. 

I always forget to breathe during Christmas.  There are so many things to do, to think about and to accomplish that I find myself running out of the essential resources necessary to keep going.

It was, however, a wonderful Christmas season filled with music, family, worship and fun.  Here's one version of our family Christmas photo:  Each of us chose a pose that represented what had transpired for us over the past year. 

Another time-consuming but very rewarding project I did during December is pictured below.  It was a commission for a friend's daughter with her confirmation verse.  I realize it's not the best picture, and they were going to matte it in purple,which will look much better.  But I loved the way it came together AND in time for Christmas (just barely).

 

That's a bit of a catch up for now.  Happy New Year to all my friends in "Blogland"!

Christmas camera play

Before I leave the Christmas season altogether, I wanted to share these:

Merry Christmas (a little late)

I love Christmas with all the great music, family stuff and worship opportunities.  What I don't like is putting my daily schedule on hold so we can experience all the Christmas extras.  One thing that worked well this year is taking time to do a daily Advent devotional.  I learned about the book God With Us, (edited by Pennoyer and Wolfe) at Mary's blog, A Splendid Adventure.  Two years in a row she has included readings from the book during Advent.  In addition, Lori from Elvie Studio shared about a little Christmas journal she was making this season.  I combined both ideas and created a little journal about my daily Advent readings.  I wanted to blog about it as I went along, but this will have to do.

Here's the cover

As you can see, it's just a little accordion fold booklet using Arches textwove paper

And here's a close-up of the pages.

It was a great project -- small enough not to stress over and simple enough to do each day (or almost each day).  I'm learning that time spent with God and time doing art don't have to be mutually exclusive.

I have tried to keep up with my blog reading, and have been enjoying the traditions, photos and ideas that you (my blog friends) have shared.  And I look forward to more great posts in the new year!

Arboretum tree

Here's a few more pictures of our work-in-progress.  I had to leave the actually tree decorating festivities early so I don't have any pics of the finished product.  Soon!

Letter tags that we made into garlands:

Origami stars:

Putting it all together:

Stay tuned . . .

Christmas ornaments already?!

Our calligraphy group is decorating a Christmas tree at the arboretum this year.  So all members have been invited to submit decorated tags and papers.  Some will be cut up for origami ornaments and some will be hung as is.  Here's what I've come up with so far:

I'll post more pictures as the process continues.  We're getting together Sunday afternoon to begin to pull it all together.

Now that Christmas is over, I can share one of the big secret projects I was working on.  A few posts ago I showed you the pillows I was making for my oldest daughter, Robyn.  I also created a lap quilt for her to go with them.  I FORGOT to take pictures as I went along, but I have these two of her opening it.  Around the outside border, I lettered some of the verses from I Cor. 13 -- the "love chapter" in the Bible.  Fortunately I have a book by Lisa Engelbrecht that explains exactly how to letter on fabric.  Click here to see/order the book.  And it worked beautifully!  There are 5 quilt squares that match the ones in her pillows, and 4 pictures that I printed out on special (hopefully) color fast printer fabric.  Maybe the next time I stop by her apartment I'll bring my camera and take some close-ups.  Anyway, she was thrilled!

Merry Christmas!

Our church created this beautiful collage picture during our worship services in December. If you look closely at Jesus, you will see that the entire nativity scene is made out of advertising that we received for this Christmas season. There are four panels -- we worked on one at a time so no one really knew what the whole picture was going to look like. We just filled in the colos written in each section. On Christmas Eve we set up the whole picture and it literally looked like stained glass. So it is possible to see the real reason for Christmas in the midst of all the hype and merchandising.

Happy Birthday, Jesus!