Une Envie de Sel

This Christmas, I vowed that I would make all my gifts from scratch. It seemed like the time...it seemed like the season. I had grand plans. I cut out patterns and bought materials. I had visions of felt animals and moss-and-paper crowns, of cardboard castles and encrusted wrappings.
But a tiny Q has a way of whisking away time with a magic broom, just the way she scatters snowy stacks of paper from my studio worktables. I could see those white paper sheets of time scattering at my feet, or catching the wind and sailing serenely skyward. Before I knew it, it was mid-December, and all my crafty materials still stood heaped in their corner like a box of forgotten toys.
What was I to do? Maybe by next Christmas, I thought, I could manage to weave all these scraps and fabrics, moss and feather, gilded thread and shells into something worthy of giving. But for this holiday season?
In the end, I resorted to the one thing I can do in short order, and without a great deal of mental focus: drawing.
Need it or not, each person on my list will receive a sketch of some sort or another. The two above are for a fellow adoptive mother, and for my sister-in-law, respectively. For nearby friends, I have bought white paper bags, on which I'll do a sketch of their children - later to be filled with gingerbread or marzipan and tied with raffia. For distant friends, I've bought plain white folding cards, on which - instead of the traditional family photo - I will do a sketch of the recipient's family.
Not exactly the sort of handmade holiday I had originally envisioned...but sometimes, as a mother, you have to find new ways to make things happen.
And maybe in the New Year I'll find the time to conjure something from that pile of scraps in the corner...