More uses for the ephemeral apothecary...
...creating a New Year's gift for a dear friend, with an antique bottle, some tissue paper and a bag of rosebud tea that we brought back from Beijing...




...voilá!

I made this bird for a friend...a friend who wanted a bird and couldn't find one.
He's my very first bird, and so he's a little rough around the edges. In fact, he was only going to be a prototype, a form sewn from felt to see if the pattern worked. But as I sewed, he sort of had a character of his own...so I let him take on a life.
Here he is, a little scrappy, a little lopsided, but full of his own, wild spirit. Hope you like him, dear friend...I'm posting him here since he won't make it through the mail to your little island in time for Christmas. OX

Well, I may not have accomplished all the fanciful holiday projects I had in mind, but I have set my hand to paper and accomplished at least one thing: my hand-drawn, individual Christmas cards. Each of these are of someone's son or daughter. (Except for the bottom left, which is actually of my daughter, for someone who requested it). This is turning out to be a delightful project, and although I despair of having all of them finished in time for the holiday, at least it's coming together.

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...