Corn Cob Birds

Day 60: Many of the ornaments on my Solstice Shrub are at least partly hand-made. In this case, the birds were store-bought, but I designed and created the corn cobs by beading them over a felt core tightly rolled around real cornhusks using #6 beads. Later, I took the process to extremes and made tiny end-of-thumb sized baskets, each holding three corn cobs made with #13 beads, so small that a standard beading needle wouldn't pass through the hole. Now as you might have guessed, my tree is full of birds of all sorts: resin, wood, felt, terra cotta, ceramic, metal. It's no wonder the chickadees sit on the shepherd's-hook outside the window looking at them. I'm sure they'd love to come inside to join the flock.

Accidentally Artistic

Day 80: Taking down the Christmas tree is on tomorrow's agenda, a task which won't be as lengthy as in years past because I did some serious weeding of ornaments this year. My original plan had been to return to a theme of "birds only," but expanded that stipulation first to include "anything which might be found in a tree" and then later to include decorations with personal significance. You see where this is going, right? Well, I did manage to thin the collection by about 10%, which at least simplified the process of decorating for the holidays. Now technically, I could have shifted sheep to a different pasture, i.e., they could have been reclassified as knickknacks, but I really don't have much space for kitsch. In real life, Cindy (right) and Ivy (left) were two ewes in my flock when it was at its peak of seven sheep. They were best friends and were always to be found together, sometimes apart from the rest of the mob. One year, I decided to try my hand at modelling them in Fimo, a polymer clay which must be baked in the oven. It has to be said that my artistic skills are rather wanting, but occasionally, I've surprised myself by creating something acceptable, and such was the case here. Hung on the tree side by side and joined by a strand of perle cotton, Cindy and Ivy are each about an inch and a half tall. Their fleece locks were made by rolling out the clay until it was paper-thin, then cutting it into 1 mm. wide strips, short pieces of which were twisted and applied to their bodies with the tip of a toothpick. It was a painstaking process, but I am quite proud of the results. When I hang them on the tree, I have to remind myself that while sheep farming is fun on one hand, those cold, wet nights in the lambing shed and the annual desperate search for a shearer willing to service a small flock more than adequately speaks in favour of purchasing raw fleece or roving for my spinning projects. I'll keep my sheep on the Christmas tree, thank you.

A Little Background Radiation

Day 68: As you might guess from the 25-cent price tag, these ornaments date back a few years. In fact, they're almost as old as I am, and come from an era when nuclear power was envisioned as the solution to all the world's energy problems. Radiation was very poorly understood, and radium was used in a wide variety of household applications ranging from glow-in-the-dark watch faces to Christmas ornaments such as the icicles shown here. Interestingly, the amount of glow emitted by the icicles has changed very little over more than half a century, and in an even stranger turn of events, the plastic snowflakes which were NOT "glow-in-the-dark" but were stored in the same box seem to have picked up traces of radiation. When the room is entirely darkened, their shapes can be made out on the tree, faintly apparent but nevertheless glowing. Oh, for a Geiger counter!