This Year, Reeeeally

I'm a big fan of New Years. It's the official day of List Makers everywhere. For one brief moment we get to make our list and make it official...at least until we lose the list or break down and burn it. But besides some slight pitfalls, I love The Resolution.

I'll be working on mine. (Pre-resolution resolution: no goals pertaining to the body!)

So happy List Making Day and see you on the flip side. I think 2007 is going to be a great year for crafts (and my collection of gel mediums!)

Artist Wednesday!

I've been reading some good art magazines lately and keep coming across different artists. In an effort to be more aware of various peoples' work I'm going to start posting some of those artists' names each Wednesday. Take a look. Inspiration comes from everywhere.

The first 4 do sculpture while the last is an oil and watercolor painter from Oregon. (!!!) I'll be checking her work out the next time I go to Portland~

Andy Goldsworthy
Henry Moore
Magdalena Abakanowicz
David Huang
Rachel Ann Austin

Craft Cat Project 2: Snowflakes

Decorate someones door (maybe while they sleep) with this cute and easy project! I hung them across Susan's office.

Again- Forgive the photos. Apparently I don't have the skill for something as complex as white on brown photography. Guess I'll never be an Arctic photographer after all.

Ingredients:
5 Pipe cleaners per snowflake
(cut 2 in half and 3 keep whole)
Chop stick


Recipe:
Wrap a whole pipe cleaner around chop stick. Wrap medium tight. Carefully pull pipe cleaner off chopstick.
Pull half a pipe cleaner through the tight coils. Gently extend coils so that they are length of half pipe cleaner.
Repeat this 2 more times until you have three total.

Take the 3 and stack on top of each other so that their centers overlap. Space evenly.

Wrap final half pipe cleaner around the centers making sure that you wind in between each connecting so that nothing jostles loose.


Put a dob of glitter glue on your finger and rub it lightly into pipe cleaner. Let side dry before adding glitter glue to opposite side. To hang, tie thread to one of the snowflake legs and the other to whatever.

Craft Cat: Project 1 (Tea)

Due to the chaos of the past week, our news letter didn't include Craft Cat. I wanted to put up some ideas for Holiday projects. Please forgive the photography. It was sort of snap and go.

But before the projects, here's some updates on what's going down here:

-filming with David Kitler finished up last night around 10pm. This was sort of a marathon shoot in that David's work has such detail. Filming didn't wrap until 11:30pm one night even! The man can draw and the DVD is going to be great. We wish him a safe drive back north.

-Zach is working on Claudine Hellmuth's DVD audio as I write, which means we are getting closer to getting that out. I'm really excited about this and have been playing with the techniques since she filmed in October. I've kept mum but it's almost too hard.

-I'm in the middle of the final rough edit of Sherri Haab Metal Clay. The Watson and Guptel book/DVD comes out I think in spring. We'll be releasing at least one more of her DVDs then. Your gifting with never be the same!

-Tonight is the Holiday Party complete with secret santas. We just got the news this morning that Lynn and Jim are giving us Friday AND Tuesday off. Very nice of them. Zach and I will both be using some of that time to make up hours. We *almost* got to leave our computers!

Onto the goods:

Project 1: Decorative Tea


Ingredients:
Assortment of Tea
Small rectangles of various papers
Stapler


Recipe:
Remove paper tags from tea bags. (Careful with the staple)
Add your paper and staple.

Wrap these in a box and give with a pretty mug for a complete gift!

Let there be...oh nevermind.

If you were standing in the Creative Catalyst Productions office on Thursday night around 7:15 pm, this is what you would see.


And then if you were standing in that same place at 10 am the next morning?

Wait, oh wait, what about 7pm Friday night?

You guessed it...


Actually, for a good portion of today you would have Susan in the semi pitch dark running orders through one computer run by our neighbor's power and the postage printer running off a borrowed family generator (her family's generator). She was absolutely determined to get orders off but finally had to leave around 4 because her fingers were so cold (no extra power for heat!)

So now Jim, Lynn and I are all in hotel rooms and might be setting up a studio for filming David Kitler in one as well a la Portland Art and Soul style (only without the sounds of low flying jets.) David is somewhere between here and the Canadian border driving south. We can't get a hold of him (he has no cell phone) to let him know that the road MapQuest is probably telling him to take to our studio might be under 6 + inches of water by the time he arrives...oh, AND that there is no power and we're moving the entire operation elsewhere. Who knew that EVERY conference room in the city would be filled with holiday type festivities. There are actually a LOT of conference rooms in our small town. There are also apparently a lot of holiday festivities.

Project 1 of....

I've almost finished gift one for the holiday 12. I keep getting sidetracked with ideas for other non-Christmas-list projects, but still one is better than none. I hope I'm still not saying that December 24th.

The picture above is something I did for work. During the holidays if people order more than a certain amount they recieve this pretty little mouse pad as sort of a thank you. The mouse pad is the kind where you can put a picture inside so the bosses asked me to make the image that we put as the temporary picture.

Anyway, it was quite fun to do and I sort of felt guilty that I was having so much fun during work hours.

Handmade for the Holidays

I walked into a shopping mall this week and had a scary revelation:
The Holidays are upon us.



On the one hand this means baking, good movies, and hot cocoa!

On the other hand, it means confined spaces brimming with so many people you wonder if they are all actually real.
So I threw down the gauntlet...

...which was an empty Starbucks cup, which I quickly picked up because I'm strongly anti-littering...
...and am making a goal for myself: I want to hand make my Christmas.

No final product can come from a mall. My gift list isn't so long- around 11-12 people.
The men will be the toughest, but they are anyways.

Here are my (completely arbitrary) rules:
Gifts must be handmade, secondhand or altered new. For example, if I screen print clothing I don't have to make the clothes; however it would be better if they came from Goodwill. Double points!

When the season is over, I'll look back and see how I did. So pull out the supplies, good ideas, and of course, the cocoa. The holidays are in full swing.

T Minus

I can see it right there on the calendar. Twenty, count’em 2-0, days until Christmas. If you take out days we have David Kitler here, and then the holiday parties and perhaps count sleeping, that really only leaves like 10 days. This probably isn’t helpful thinking. What IS helpful thinking is that somewhere in that giant pile of fabric, paper and paint (spanning now 3 rooms) are loads of *potential* gifts.

In other news, Creative Catalyst Productions rescued an abandoned cat out of a drainage ditch this past weekend. (Our shoes will be muddy until spring). It’s amazing how hunger overcomes fear. Bobby (her temporary name) was emaciated and terrified. All it took was a cat of wet cat food and a good night’s sleep someplace safe and she follows us around the yard hoping for some attention. Our neighbors have offered to take her and she’ll have her first vet appointment next week. Thank goodness for we’ve reached cat capacity. If our neighbors hadn’t offered, I was on a campaign to offer a cat adoption in our newsletter. Speaking of newsletter...back to work!