Consumed

I do this to myself every year.  I get it into my head that the Christmas season is the season for making things.  Blame it on my Grandmother and my Mother.  Every day in December (excluding Christmas eve and the big day), their kitchen tables were covered in newspaper with a scattering of crafting odds and ends.  I remember making jeweled tree ornaments with my Grandma, the kind that required sticking straight pins in the center of sequins to cover syrofoam teardrops.  We made little things with lots of parts that were tedious.  My grandfather would also make things in his woodshop, mostly brightly colored whirlygigs for gardens, or pretty bird houses.  When the crafting was complete, we'd begin the baking.  My grandma seemed to have a recipe for every known cookie in the Western Hemisphere.  Her buckeyes would send me into a sugar haze of lipsmacking bliss.  

After all the years of school, jobs, college, family and technology, it's the habits of my mom and grandma that have shaped me the most.  I grew up in the peak of the American auto industry, and quite simply, we were a family who made things.

This week I am consumed.  My pretty dining room is now covered in a project that I hope will continue long into the future.  I've been making use of the french cotton watercolor paper that came my way.  After months of working at my sewing machine with fibrous plush, it is absolute bliss to work with paper.  Everyone needs change.  I'm not saying that my new romance with papercraft is going to mean the end of my sewing, but it's energizing to embark on a new project. 

The first pictures show a little paper house I made that is not yet painted.  I plan to add color tomorrow.  The scenery behind it is a painting I made and then shaped the paper into a semi circle so that it would stand up without support.  Everything glows on the inside due to the fantastic invention of LED tea lights.