It's Beginning to Look Like Christmas

My front door with snowman greeter

It's beginning to look like Christmas around my house. The day after Thanksgiving is one of my favorite days to start decorating for the holidays. This year I painted snowmen greeters to hang on my front door as well as to give to my friends as gifts. These happy snowmen will bring holiday cheer to my front porch and to all who see them.

Take a little break, pour yourself a cup of tea and let's take a little tour of Debra's Cottage for some holiday inspiration for painting a happy little "snowman greeter" for your holiday door. I will give you a quick how to lesson on painting your very own snowman greeter.








Finding Inspiration at Debra's Cottage . . . . .

Here . . . . . . . .

There . . . . . .

Everywhere . . . .

How to paint a snowman door greeter.

The snowmen door greeters are so easy to make and will take you about one hour to complete. I like to use a square canvas - 5 X 5 is the best size for the door greeter. You can also use a 5X5 square of plywood. Michael's Craft store is a great place to buy art supplies. They also have pre cut wood boards in all sizes.

Pick a color to use as your background - I paint with acrylic paints as they are not toxic and water based (means easy to clean up ) and used FolkArt #922 -Bayberry. Draw a circle for the head and add a top hat - or any kind of hat you want on your snowman. Then draw a carrot for the nose and a mouth and eyes.

Now you can start painting - you will need several coats of white for the snow - note that I used some lavender on the sides of the face since snow is not pure white. This will give him a more "painterly" look, however; he will look just as cute with pure white. Paint the top hat black and the scarf any color you want. Paint the area under the scarf white for the body.

Now for the fun part - putting the finishing touches on your snowman. Put a little white with your black to add high lights to the hat. Paint two black circles for the eyes and a happy mouth. Mix a little red and white to make pink and paint the round cheeks to complete the happy look. Paint your scarf any color - I used red and green to match my front door and added a little red ribbon and holly on the hat. The last step is to add the snow flakes. Thoroughly wet your paint brush and dip it into the white paint - make sure your brush has lots of water - then splatter the paint onto your canvas by hitting the handle of your brush - this will fling the paint all over your canvas to create the look of snow. CAUTION - this is very messy - I put the painting in the bottom of my kitchen sink to do this or better yet - take it outside. The last step is to add screw eyes on the back of the canvas and tie with a bow.

This is what the screw eyes on back look like. They are very simple to screw in and then thread your ribbon through and tie a bow.
Completed snowman greeter.

Please feel free to leave me a comment if you have any questions about making your snowman greeter. Next time we will paint a pink "shabby chic" snowlady greeter.

A Cold Morning

Ice crystals on the front door.




White Dutch clover.



Straw.




Raspberry.



Parsley.

Winter Landscapes

This is an estuary of the Charles River. Our yard backs up to the protected land surrounding this waterway. These photos were taken a few blocks away, where a road crosses the stream.

The view to the north:




The view to the south:




Winterberries hang over the water here and there.




The water is trying to escape its banks right now.

Ilex verticillata, Winterberry

This native plant is at the height of its beauty now. Winterberry is a deciduous holly that prefers marshy wood edges. The berries appear on the female plants around September or October.





In October, the leaves turn yellow and speckled.



The leaves have now dropped off, leaving behind the berries. This photo is of a small winterberry growing in my yard. It doesn’t have many berries. Elsewhere, in wild patches along the roads, dense thickets of winterberry are now blazing red against the bleak woods.



The berries will last until midwinter, and are an important food source for various bird species. It appears that other creatures eat them, as well, judging by the poo that was recently left in my yard. By the size of the dropping, I would guess it was either a raccoon or an opossum that made the deposit, but I am left wondering how such a heavy rodent could have climbed a slender winterberry.



The berries aren’t edible for humans, sadly.

Winter is here - garden still looking (not bad?)

Globe artichoke making new growth NOW! adding a touch of life to an otherwise wintery scene. Solidago rugosa to the right standing well. The first stages of a prairie planting behind - actually part of a septic soakaway scheme - same idea as a reedbed, soaking up nutrients.





Grasses (mostly Calamagrostis 'Karl Foerster' and perennials in November sunlight. Anything which has collapsed into a soggy mess by now has been cleared away - leaving things which should stand a few months more. I'm re-organising and re-planting around these surviving stems - so much easier working around landmarks than a site cleared of all above-ground growth, especially since these are all the good long-season structural elements.

Box blight - latest idea from Germany

Thought I had better pass this on. This is a summary of a letter to GartenPraxis which I recently spotted.

The fungicides Chlorthalonil and Prochloraz are carcinogenic and persistent enough to possibly present a danger to water supplies – both are in the process of being de-listed from the EU list of permitted fungicides

Acute cylindrocladium infections  have been treated with a thick dusting of rock flour on the foliage. Apparently the results are surprising in their effectiveness. It is suggested that the high pH of the material is what is negatively affecting the fungus. The article goes on to suggest that soil acidity is detrimental to box health – it is a plant of calcareous soils.

From GartenPraxis 11-2008, p. 7


So – what the **** is rock flour?? Can I make bread with it?
Rock flour or rock dust is finely-ground rock which bio-dynamic companies are promoting – don’t ask me where you can get it. The bio-d brigade claim that soils are deficient in essential minerals after years of cropping which this stuff puts back in - fair enough, but since this gardening methodology is inspired by the  quite honestly barmy Rudolf Steiner philosophy, there is an awful lot of guff about “life-force energy” in any of their literature. On this occasion though it looks as if one of their products may just do the trick.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is almost upon us and I have been busy in my kitchen this weekend baking pumpkin bread and cookies for my family and friends. My kitchen smells yummy and I am reminded of how thankful I am for family traditions and how much I treasure my family and friends.

As I look around my kitchen, sipping a cup of tea while waiting for cookies to bake, I am reminded of how much the simple, every day objects in my life serve as inspirations for my paintings. My kitchen is a happy place ;filled with southern light all throughout the day with blue and white check curtains blowing in the breeze and filled with my treasured collections of roosters.

Finding Inspiration . . . . . . Here . . . . . .

There . . . . . . . .

If you look close, you can see roosters on my chandlier and on plates in the plate rack.

Everywhere . . . . . . .

Bentley, my Studio Assistant, waiting for the cookies to come out of the oven!

With all of the roosters for inspiration, I decided to paint roosters while waiting for the cookies to bake.

I painted two small roosters and added eye hooks so they can be hung with a ribbon on a door nob in my kitchen.

Next I sketched out a "welcome rooster" painting that I will hang outside the French door to my kitchen. I like to sketch with a fabric marker instead of a pencil (pencils tend to smear and I prefer the marker). Next I started filling in the dark feathers on the rooster. I paint the darks first and then paint the lights and finish with highlights.

The cookies are done and I am off to deliver pumpkin bread to friends. I will show you Mr. welcome rooster completed on a later post.

Wishing you and your family blessings during this season of Thanksgiving.

November

I thought I might continue to dig today, but the ground is hard, and the air is bitterly cold.




Just last week I saw frogs swimming in our tiny pond.




Without leaves, the back yard seems wide open.

Lycopodium Obscurum, or Not a Pine

These are not pine saplings. They are an ancient type of organism called clubmoss. Before trees ruled the land, clubmosses were the towering giants. Imagine one of these with a trunk four feet in diameter, standing as tall as an office building.

Common names for this humble survivor are “ground fir”, “tree clubmoss”, and “princess pine”. Its spores are the original photographer’s flash powder. Now, it is hard to find because it has been a popular winter decoration.

Princess pine is supposedly hard to transplant, but these seem to be doing well more than a month since Marna dug them for me. She scooped out a good chunk of their native soil when she dug them, and I planted them in the bed of perpetually-moist bog muck along my wooded path. So far that seem to like their new home.

[Update] As of May 2010, these guys are looking pitiful. I expect them to die eventually. Dang it. That will teach me to try the "big shovel full of dirt" method. Some plants (and plant-like organisms) need to be left where they grew.

Getting Colder

We wake up to frost and ice some mornings now.







We’re due to get our first snow flurries soon.

The strawberries have been tucked in for the winter.



Along the base of the front bed, I planted crocuses, creeping thyme, and wild violets.



To my surprise, the alyssum is still blooming, and the Swiss chard is still growing. And the saffron crocuses are coming along nicely.

More Pansies

I am still planting my late fall and early winter pansies and can't seem to get enough of their happy little faces. I found these darling Victorian seed holders at a garden store last year and thought the Pansy seed packets looked adorable in them (I think that they would make a cute little painting).

Finding Inspiration

Here

There . . .and . . .everywhere

Pansy painting inspired by my newly planted pansies.

The garden cloche with bird on top was a little treasure I found in a vintage garden shop. I really like it and have used it over and over in my garden paintings. This time I put a little pot of lavender pansies in the cloche. I like to arrange items together to get an idea of how they will look in the painting. I call this my "set up for inspiration".

"Garden Day" painting with pansies and roses.

Cooking with edible flowers

My Grandmother was an avid gardener and loved to use edible flowers, especially pansies, to decorate cakes and cookies. This year I planted pansies from seeds so I would have organically grown pansies to use in my baking.

Pansy Flower Cookies

To make pansy flower cookies: use any standard recipe for sugar cookies - wash and dry culinary or organically grown pansy flowers and set aside - bake cookies for 5 minutes and remove from oven - lightly press pansy flower on top of cookies - sprinkle with sugar and bake until lightly browned. Flowers will come out lighter and have the subtle look of the pansy petal.

Lightly press flower into sugar cookie after baking for 5 minutes


Remove from oven and enjoy!

Mini cupcakes decorated with pansy flowers.