Friday Finds and Paint Party Friday

It finally started to rain here - such bliss!! One storm after the other are chasing through the state and they are all dumping quite some rain on the dried out ground. It is such a relief, and I hope that over the winter months there will be more rain so our reservoirs will fill up again.

While looking out of the window, I was amazed how beautiful my small Japanese maple in the backyard looks. In this grey and wet weather - and against the dark fence - the color of the leaves really pops. A wonderful find for this week.

Apart from that the week has been busy - in less than 10 days I'll have my first holiday fair of the season and I'm still in full creative mode. There are two new paintings:

 Snowman Family on 6x6 wood panel

Mixed media on 8x8 canvas board

I've also made a few more ornaments from the leftover redwood of our picket fence.

Christmas Cat and Christmas Owl

For the holiday boutique in Ukiah we were asked to donate one item for the silent auction. This little owl mixed media painting on a 5x5 canvas is mine.

I'm linking to both Friday Finds and Paint Party Friday - perhaps you'd like to check them out.

A Very Different Kind of Fence

You probably wonder what snowmen with hats and scarves are doing in a post about - good - fences?

Well - look closer.

The pinkish-red one

Can you guess? This is leftover wood from the fence the Geek and I built in the spring. Beautiful, untreated redwood. It was sitting in our garden shed in all kinds of different sizes because I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. Some of the really small parts we threw in our fire pit on warm summer evenings. But the others are still holding out in the shed.

So I grabbed some of the smaller parts and made ornaments from them - as I showed you here. But what to do with the bigger parts?

It was so obvious - snowmen, of course. With hand knitted hats and scarves.

A few years ago Kaefer had asked me to knit a hat, scarf and leg warmers for her American Girl doll. Lucky for me I still had the pattern and found that the AG hats fit perfectly on my wooden snowmen. I got some skeins of colorful yarn and happily knitted along. The great thing about knitting these is that I can watch a movie while creating the hats and scarves.

The wood is untreated and I left the imperfections of the wood - I only primed it and then painted over it. The "personality" of the wood is still there.

The blue one

Painting on the faces was fun, and I also added a few buttons. Good thing I have quite a lot of buttons! The snowmen are available in my Etsy shop.

But of course I will show you a "real" fence photo - an image of the fence where my snowmen come from, the "mother fence" if you will.... taken in the spring when I had all the wonderful poppies in my front garden (of course they are all gone, but I can already see some new seedlings!).

So - do my snowmen count as a good fence? I admit it's a bit unusual... still, I'm linking to Theresa's "Good Fences" where you can find a lot of real, honest fences!

A Trio of Wooden Snowmen

Remember when we built a picket fence around the front and side of our house in the spring? Quite some wood was left over that I had piled in our shed. First I had no idea what to do with it, I only knew that I didn't want to throw away all these pieces of perfectly fine wood.

Then it came to me - ornaments. Of course!!! And since I like snowmen, it was pretty obvious that I would make snowmen ornaments.

Snowman with blue-green hat and scarf

I first put down a layer of gesso, adhered some torn pieces of scrapbook paper and then covered the background with light blue paint. The snowmen were painted after that and further embellished with glitter glue that shall represent the falling snow. A screw eye drilled on top for the hanger and I also added a sparkling ribbon.

The first "batch" is done and available in my Etsy shop. I think I will do some more with different colored backgrounds.

Snowman with red hat

It was so much fun creating these little guys. Of course as true Northern Californian snowmen they are made of untreated redwood.

Snowman with black hat

Are you making some ornaments for this year's holidays?

I am linking to Paint Party Friday, joining some wonderful and talented artists.

A Snowman Full of Cheer

A couple weeks ago I decided to paint a ball ornament. Mindy Lacefield inspired me to try this when she showed how to paint a ball ornament with one of her cute little girls in  Christy Tomlinson's last year's Christmas workshop. Of course I knew there was no way I could paint a girl on a round object, but a snowman, I thought, should be easier.

Besides, I really like snowmen. For me they make the cutest Christmas ornaments, cards, decorations. Whenever we hit the snow in the mountains you can be sure that we are building some kind of snowman.

I painted a layer of gesso first and then a light blue background. My snowman, of course, ended up being pretty round as well. Since I like bright light green he got a bright green and red hat and scarf. Do snowmen have rosy cheeks? Well, mine does...

This little guy is available in my Etsy shop.

I'm sharing this with Paint Party Friday where you can find so many talented artists. Why not visit some of them? The list is here.