Frosty Thanksgiving Morning

We woke up to a very frosty but beautiful morning.

The night was clear, no coastal fog, and that means frost. It also usually means a beautiful sunny day, but cold. The heavy wind seems to have disappeared, blowing somewhere else. I guess there's a lot of snow dumped onto the Sierra.

The reminders of summer looked pretty cold as well.

All the water was frozen including everything that it holds.

But the frost painted all these amazing pictures, I couldn't help but just love it. No matter the cold.

Have a lovely Thanksgiving!

Wednesday? Again?

Hello WOYWWers, just a quick one today - it's Thanksgiving week, always a crazy busy time and I'm not even hosting a Thanksgiving dinner but we're going to spend Thanksgiving with friends in town - wonderful German-American company. It means bringing a SpiceNogg cake from Trader Joe's and some red cabbage, that's it. Easy, huh?

Okay, so this is what's on my work table:

I'm working on the St. Nick's presents for my neighbors. In Germany, all the children put out a shoe on the evening of December 5th, and during the night St. Nicholas comes by and fills the shoe with sweets that the kids find in the morning. After we had moved here, I introduced a slightly altered version into my neighborhood, leaving some kind of German sweets at my neighbors' doors. This year it will be a little bag filled with sweets plus these bottles with cocoa powder and marshmallows in them. The bottles are Starbucks Frappuccino bottles.

The finished bottles will look like this:

If you want to see what work tables around the world look like, hop on over to Julia's Stamping Ground to find a complete list.

A Home

Today I'm over at Vision and Verb, pondering the possibility of owning a home. Why don't you come over and visit?

WeekWord: Rock

Maria at Simply Cool Stuff chose the word for this week - rock.

The very first thought that shot into my head was 'Rock', the German word for skirt. A rock is 'Felsen' or 'Stein' - completely different words.

Second thought - rock 'n roll.

As a third thought I saw a beautiful little spirit rock with an engraved coyote that I bought several years ago at some Native American store and that I carry around with me pretty often. And this rock stuck with me.

The coyote is one of my favorite animals in the wild - and a wonderful spirit animal of the Native American World. No one other than painter and children's book author Harriet Peck Taylor can describe coyote better than she did in her note to her book "Coyote and the Laughing Butterflies":

"Coyote is a popular character in Pueblo legends as well as in tales of other native peoples. Most often he is called the Trickster. But he is more complicated than that, and therin lies his appeal. He frequently brags and gets himself in trouble, but he is also courageous and has magical powers that he sometimes uses to help others. He does not always follow the rules, but sometimes acts in bold, impulsive ways. Often foolish and lazy, he is full of life and we can see ourselves in him. Coyote makes us laugh and can teach us about ourselves and the world around us."

I love the special spirit of Coyote, and this rock is my spirit rock or worry stone. It pretty much lives in the pocket of my jeans where I can always feel it or touch it when I need to. Its smooth and fits perfectly inside my hand. When I have it with me, I feel Coyote's magical powers, his courage and boldness, but also his wit and his liveliness.

Each one of us has her own rock. If you want to read more, look at the list on Maria's blog.

Two Tuesday Challenges

Over at Kard Krazy the challenge for this week is to create just the background of a tag because often a background is beautiful in itself. So true. I've chosen a snowy background - I'm really getting in the Christmas groove. I guess it's about time.

I put snowflake templates on the tag and then sprayed it with Glimmer Mist in frost, then stamped a snowflake (Paper Candy) in silver metallic randomly all over. As a finish I added a white snowflake embellishment that I tied to the ribbon.

Tuesday Taggers wanted to see the word Love, Peace or Joy on our creation. Here is my little ornament - gessoed first, than painted with garnet metallic acrylic paint. The angel (Tin Can Mail) is stamped on a piece of cardstock that I distressed (mustard seed, tattered rose) and colored a little bit. Some patterned paper glued to the star, topped with the angel panel, the letters for the word "joy" and a poinsettia.

This is my 100th post!

Another Wednesday

... and we all know what that means! Snooping around the world's crafters' workdesks and get inspiration from everywhere! If you want to see what artists and creative souls around the globe are doing this very Wednesday, hop on over to Julia's Stamping Ground for a list that seems to grow longer and longer every week.

I took a break from the little angel ornaments - I have to work on their hair and I'm still not quite sure what to do. So I decided to prepare my next class, Christmas tags. Enrollment for that class looks good at the moment, so it actually might be a go.

This is the stuff that I pulled for the class, now I "only" have to design the tags and put the class kits together.

My Autumn greeting cards class at the center was cancelled (again!), so last Monday I offered it at home and had a full class! Here are the cards we created that evening:

Short and sweet today. Happy WOYWW!

New WeekWord Host

The wonderful Maria at Simply Cool Stuff will be our next host for the WeekWord.

Please hop on over to her beautiful blog on Monday and find out about the new word. Please remember to leave a comment for Maria if you want to play.

I very much enjoyed being host this past week. I enjoyed reading and seeing all of your thoughts about November.