March's snowy start!

By the looks of this photo it is hard for me to even say that March and April are usually some of my favorite times of year. They are! It was a surprising treat to have the snow fall. Of course the weatherman always promises such blissful snowy evenings, but rarely delivers. Even now it is still coming down! I think we have a real live snow storm on our hands! I still have power though, so I am tucked into my living room with my two lovely puppies. As we speak I am watching romance movies, whilst in front of the fire. We will see what tomorrow holds.

Hopefully NO WORK! 

Textile Blocks...

I ran across these lovely wooden block stamps a few months ago. A dear friend of mine had decorated her bathroom with these things. I questioned her sanity...but why? She proceeded to tell me the history. They have been used for hundreds of years in India, China, and Egypt for textile production. Each one is hand carved from pear wood, and the wood is discolored from all the dyes (I like the dark colors though) - I thought these would come in handy for clay work, and a myriad of other crafty things. So I will try and get my hands on some of these.

Clay - like play-doh for adults.

As promised photos of my fabulous pottery class. I look forward to Wednesday night all week! This itches a creative scratch for me. This is a primative coil piece. I used about 6 giant coils to cover the inside of this form. When my instructor saw all the finger prints from fusing the coils together, he said it looked very Picasso/Van Gogh. Well Van Gogh is one of my all time favorite's in the art world. So I began to try and re-create a pottery texture version of starry night. Above the photo is of my second night working on the piece.

As the night went on I scored & slipped these twisted handles onto the tray. For my second or third piece I say not too shabby. I can't wait to get to the glazing process so I can share I finished pot photo with everyone, I am sure that will be much more exciting than these big piles of brown clay! A special thanks to my sister-n-law for introducing me to such a wonderful class at the William Fulton School for Crafts in Upstate, SC. If anyone is looking for a stress relief, creative outlet, and you have the slightest intrest in clay...then that is the place for you! Be forewarned though you may become totally addicted. I now spend lots of time on the internet gathering idea's and forms that I want to create. How lame!

Monday Blah's

Ahhh, the smell of cookies takes me back to a relaxing time when my mom used to whip up a batch of the above pictured no bake chocolate peanut-butter no bake cookies. These sugar packed babies have always been my number one favorite cookie. A boring awful Monday got me to think about my top five cookie picks. Below I have listed them in particular order:

1. No bake Peanut-butter chocolate oatmeal (these technically might be candy) 

2. Old fashion chocolate chip

3. Gingerbread cookies

4. Fortune Cookies

5. Chocolate filled hazlenut cookies

Below is the recipe for the chocolate drop cookies I love so dearly enjoy:
Ingredients
2 cups sugar
4 tablespoons cocoa
1 stick butter
1/2 cup milk
1 cup peanut butter
1 tablespoon vanilla
3 cups oatmeal
Waxed paper

Directions

In a heavy saucepan bring to a boil, the sugar, cocoa, butter and milk. Let boil for 1 minute then add peanut butter, vanilla and oatmeal. On a sheet of waxed paper, drop mixture by the teaspoonfuls, until cooled and hardened. Eat up like crazy!!!

Above is all the lovely handmade items that my dear sister-n-law & brother-n-law gave to my husband and I. Everything was so cool and unique that I don't know where to start. The pen was hand turned and made out of acrylic in the perfect color of purple. It is so sparkly and cool I don't even want to use it, I just want to set it in my wallet for people to oooh and aaahh over. All the little clay works are from the tireless hands of my sister-n-law, who has inspired me to follow in her path in a pottery class. Most are magnets, with intricate designs each with it's own special meaning. The shells represent our Christmas beach trip. The circle with the rose, and the circle with the tree are winter-time images. There is one with two little hearts I think that is my husband I. Then the coolest of all this the leaf patterned tray that everything is sitting on. She worked really neat designs into it, and topped it all off with this delicious glaze. How inspiring!

Christmastime is gone...

Well it's all over. The glitz and the glamour of the holiday season has passed, and now we have to slump through January & February and wait for the spring. In the meantime I want to share some of the photos I took while on my Christmas vacation. It was a very non-Christmas celebration. We visited Hilton Head Island, SC a family favorite of my husband's clan. Other than the exhaustion from the pre-Christmas workload, and the preperation of the trip, it was a lovely trip. We rode bikes on the beach, made cookies, and shopped til we dropped. I have far too many treasures to list. Below are a few photos so I can share the beauty of the beach in wintertime. It is like a totally different world.

My sister-n-law found a starfish washed a bit too far into the sand, so she rescued it. Don't worry she ran out in the frigid water to let it go among the waves. Not out too deep though, as my knowledgable brother-n-law pointed out starfish are a shallow water species. Without his jewels of wisdom our family would be murdering innocent creatures daily, without knowledge of it of course!


I hope everyone out there had an amazing Holiday, I know I did. Hopefully more photos are gonna be up soon, for everyone to enjoy.
Something that caught my eye a little earlier today-

"Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.
- Captain Corelli's Mandolin. "Love is the beauty of the soul." --St. Augustine