elk in the park
Here are a few elk pictures I took the other day when they came down to play in the park. Don’t miss the bighorn sheep teaser at the end. 🙂
There are 11 bighorns in this photo. How many can YOU find?
happy new year!
Just a few pics from the turn of the year. We bid farewell to 2016 with a beautiful 62-degree day in Boulder that was so, so wonderful. This week brings more snow, the beginning of school again, and the end of David’s work vacation. No pics of him, and too many of the rest of us here, I know. That’s what happens when you and the kids are running down to the river and sliding and swinging crazily around the playground, with actual sun on your skin. You forget all about the man on the hill with the cigar. Sorry, babe.
Zia has learned to knit and made some beautiful scarves and accessories over Christmas break, including that turquoise-blue scarf I’m wearing above. She surprised me with it. 🙂 The banana bread on the red plate is gluten-free, sweetened with stevia, and loaded with Kerrygold grass fed butter. We are doing our best to ditch sugar as we move toward healthier teeth for the kids.
Today we ran across a flock of bighorn sheep on the mountainside and a herd of elk grazing roadside. I’ll post a few more pics of those creatures later.
Happy, happy, happy 2017!!!
handmade christmas
Here’s a compilation of the exciting presents we’ve been making over the past two weeks. We opened them Christmas morning (and a few on Christmas Eve). Hope you enjoy them!!
These little beanie animals are made from a sewing pattern I got from this girl who makes and sells patterns on Etsy. The instructions were easy and I found the eyes and noses at Hobby Lobby.
Red fox and arctic fox for Zia; black kitty and gray wolf for Cash.
Zia wanted to make a stuffed wolf for Cash, so we made this together (no pattern). Remember the stuffed fox I made for her birthday?
I’ve made so many clay animals lately I don’t think I could count them. Zia asked for a terrarium with forest animals for Christmas, so I made this:
and these:
It was her favorite present. 🙂
Cash got his own tiny terrarium, which was his favorite present, too. Terrariums are great for kids–they are a little world you can endlessly change around.
I bought a knitting pattern from another Etsy shop, which has tons of cute amigurumi patterns. This one took me a lot longer than the sewing pattern, mostly because I was a little rusty at knitting. Eventually it all came together, mostly during car rides over the past week.
It’s for Zia, and I must say, this is my favorite of everything I made. 🙂
Just to break up all these white backgrounds, here is our decorated jade plant. It gives the house a lovely Middle Eastern flair and fills us with the expectancy of strains of sitar music.
Zia made these things for us–the tiny lion, cowboy boot and hat are for David…
the Christmas card and photo frame are for the family…
and the tiny Pippa goat and buckskin horse are for me. She did such a great job!
This is my gift to everyone, haha–before and after pics.
Cashy made two necklaces and a tiny clay bowl for Zia. He threw his whole heart into them. Love that boy. 🙂
For David, I made this tiny Mia and David. He knew who they were right away, haha. Goat included for scale perspective.
David gave me these two pairs of earrings from a shop in Winter Park. And it’s still a handmade present, LOL! The snowflakes remind me of our wedding (I wore snowflake jewelry) and the copper swirls are just so cool and artsy.
Here is a pic of the kids at Winter Park–that hat Cash is wearing is another handmade gift I made from Paw Patrol fleece he fell in love with at Hobby Lobby.
We spent Christmas Eve at Winter Park–having lunch, walking around the shops, and getting hot drinks at Starbucks. The kids had saved up their money for the toy shop, which really elevated the anticipation of the trip. Non-handmade toys!!! Yahoooooo!!!
Speaking of elevation, Winter Park sits at 12,060 ft above sea level. Even for us, that’s really high.
Christmas Day we went to Denver West to watch Moana, and here we are in the theater. Afterwards, we went home and hand-over-fist whipped up a dinner of ham, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and hot apple pie with ice cream.
Sending bright and warm wishes from our house to yours!
holiday art fairs
The art fairs I worked during the first two weeks of December are old news by now, but I never posted the pics, so here they are, at last!
Zia and I did the Holiday Mountain Market in Nederland, then whipped up several dozen tiny animals and figurines and went to the Gilpin Winter Arts Festival.
I sold a few pieces of jewelry in Ned, but once we made the tiny animals we did better, and while others were complaining that they were doing terrible, we sold enough to pay for our booth fee and more.
Zia had her own display of foxes, horses, and mer-horses!
For the Gilpin show, we had a better sense of our set-up than we did at Ned and our table was much more full.
Zia got to hold a baby sugar glider that one of the vendors was carrying around her neck in a pouch (with the rest of the brood). Zia reeeaaally wanted one after that, haha.
I’ve been making more tiny things every day since the art fairs, both to fill orders for customers and for secret Christmas presents here at home. I feel it in my bones that clay is about to come out of my ears at any moment, but I think I’m finally finished. I have a little bit of knitting left and then all my surprises will be ready for my little fur family deep in the woods, haha.
Tomorrow we head to Winter Park for Christmas Eve, then Sunday we’re home together. We’re planning on taking a train downtown to watch a movie, and then we’ll come back home for a dinner of ham, potatoes, and apple pie. And to open homemade presents. 🙂
Have a safe, warm, and happy holiday!
what we’ve been doing
We’ve been just a teensy bit busy around here. Zia and I worked three days of holiday mountain markets, and in preparation, carved, sculpted, and painted for hours on end over the past two weeks. I’ll post those market pics soon, but they were only the doorway to a whole new vista. Since then, Zia has had orders daily from classmates and teachers for tiny animals, and works till bedtime each night. After school, she come back and carefully counts and stashes her earnings.
Cash is jumping right into the creative flow, sculpting dozens of very abstract clay shapes and painting them. See that green picture above? He came to me with it and said, “Look, Mama! I drew a pig!” You are off to a good start, my boy.
I had a few custom orders from local people I met, so I’m still carving and painting, and also the owner of Wild Bear Nature Center in Nederland approached me. Today I took 21 tiny forest and farm animals to Wild Bear and put them on consignment in a mirrored display case. For the first time, my work is in a real-live brick-and-mortar shop–which is so very exciting. 🙂
