Singing game day......

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree.

Ok now, I hope you know the whole song as you need to try to identify the 12 items from the song.  This is the set that I bought after Christmas that represents one item of each part of the song.

As my wife just said to me, the set should have had 7 swans to represent 7 swans a swimming. Oh well, you know that it was made in China so the tradition gets translated into other ideas. Enjoy the game. I gave you two clues now, so you are on your own.

It has started snowing again and the wind is going to blow forty miles an hour. We bought up the supplies that we will need so we are ready. We hope that the electricity doesn't get affected.

As I was out filling the feeders I stole a shot from the neighbors tree.  It is one of those stylized shaped trees that they put on cards.  Angel boy is still hanging in there as you can see below.

You know him well and he holds his own at the end of the bench.  I just had put out a metal bucket with a water heater in it to keep water open for the birds. You can barely see the bucket over his shoulder.  I should be able to keep up with the blogs as it seems we will be inside for a very long time..........again.  Thanks for reading.

Rock Painting......

 For variety in my life I started painting lighthouse scenes on rocks that came from the Minnesota North Shore.  I would paint on ones that were part iorn ore as they had flat bottoms to allow them to sit up.
One of our friends and customers has bought them from me, but then she decided to bring me rocks from where she had visited.  I then was supplied with a photo of the area and asked to paint it. She has a little shrine of my rocks on a wood shelving unit that holds different scenes from where she had been.

This is a beach in the San Diego and one cannot expect an artist to create a very detail painting on a five inch rock.  I have to become an impressionist and put blobs of paint on to remind you of people and try to match the color of the area as close as possible.  The rock was smooth so I had fun with this one.

This rock was a difficult son of a gun.  It was very textured and the scene supplied was a long beautiful horizontal one in which I had to crop and condense to get it to happen.  I actually think I went back and reworked the sky on this after I took shots of this.

Here is a macro of this one, and the sensor really reacted funny to the rock texture.

These rocks are the best I will do.  I like doing this and plan to get out a couple more rocks of my own and create some new lighthouse paintings.  I had a couple rocks out on the railing outside and brought them in to dry out and warm up.

Thawing out my rocks on the kitchen counter.  I wasn't in a hurry so I just let them dry out and put some moisture into the air.   I will paint again today.   Thanks for reading......

Everyone is cold.....

I am not a person who has consistently fed the birds, but what times that I have, the are the most hungry when it is very cold.  I have tried to get out there and keep the three different feeders up to snuff but it is a miserable time to get out there. Our temperatures have risen to -6 degrees.  The sun is shinning and that is good, but it is too cold to stay out there for very long.
There is one set of cardinals in this neighborhood and I am honored to have them stop by once in a while.

Today the cardinal is waiting patiently for the squirrel to get his fill.  I have a goal to create a squirrel feeder so they will leave my bird feeders alone.

I wanted to share this photo even though it is off theme.  It still isn't a perfect focus, but I am working on it.

I am hoping all of my friends out there are keeping yourselves safe and warm.  I see people everywhere having trouble with getting their cars started and I feel fortunate my car is doing a good job of starting.

Everyone be careful out there and stay warm.  Thanks for spending time with me.......

Train is coming around the bend.......

I finally took the train out of the box and gave it a cleaning.  I now know why that I was so slow to do it as it has a sad ending.  My brother and I received this train from Santa.  It was in a box and wrapped in brown paper, with white heavy string tied around it to keep it shut, as scotch tape would not be available in our household, or Santa's household.  On the brown paper was written in large letters ' To Dwight and Larry from Santa.'

It was a dark early morning when the the four of us got up out of warm beds and went in the dark downstairs to see what Santa had brought.  I believe it is 1957 and I can remember that we had to wait for Dad to throw a log in the stove in the basement before we could go in to see the gifts. The house was in bad shape and it was very cold in the winter and the one bare light bulb in the ceiling still gave the presents a special look.  For a kid, it was so magical, as none of that was there the night before when I went to bed.

Dad and Mom of course are gone now.  But the co-owner of the train is gone too.  I lost him last year and I really didn't know it was going to bother me to mess with this train.  If his life had not been so tragic and self destructive.  If he had not been so unhappy and lonely always searching in the wrong places for what he needed, I wouldn't feel so bad about cleaning it up.
I am going to make it a joy in life somehow, as I get the thing running again, and I can remember Dwight when he was happy.  That was a long time ago.

I don't know where my parents bought it, but I don't see Lionel on the engine so I don't think it is a real collector's item.  My parents could have ordered it from the Montgomery Ward catalog, or bought it from Western Auto, or one other store, Coast to Coast. They were two hardware stores in the near by town.

It is funny that I blogged earlier about a cheap wind up train that I had and it also had New York Central printed on it's side.  I remember as a kid how difficult that it was to get the hitch of the train to go into that coal car.  The wheels on this set are cheaper than a lionel train as I have one older car from my two older brothers set in which to compare them. Unfortunately the back hitch of this car is broken so I won't be able to connect any of the following cars to it.  I will have to work on that.

I am going to leave this picture small as I am still having trouble taking pictures of red items with my camera. It is blurry, but I bet you can get the picture, right? This is the traditional boxcar of the train and the caboose. There was one other car that came with this train, and I know it had to have been tossed.  My nieces and nephews played with these as Mom had just thrown all things into one box. Things did get broken.  The set had a low car that had four fake reels of wire on it.  It was probably stepped on and easily broken into.  The wire spools had been taken off by curious hands.

I almost left out the caboose.  I am so glad that it is still in one piece.

My two older brothers had a Lionel train.  I thought the engine was still around, but couldn't find it when I cleared my parents house.  This  tank car is from that set as it has Lionel Trains printed on it's side. This is the one my neighbor fellow was grabbing at when he was over to the house the other day.  He collects Sinclair items and thought he had found a gold mine. The wheels and hook-up hitch are made so well compared to my brother's and mine train set.  The engine of my older brothers set had burned out.  I will ask them if they took it with them in the last few years, but I doubt it.  None of the other cars of that train are around either.

As all things get complicated, when you don't want them to, there is not a piece of track in sight.  I have a friend uptown, who owns a hardware store slash antique toy museum, and he keeps a track set up at all times.  I will leave the engine with him to work on to see if he can get it back in working order.  His toy museum I will share about later, but I may be able to get track for him.  Oh yes, no transformer either.

Well, it is late Sunday afternoon and we did make it down to Des Moines to church. It got up to 7 above today but we are already down to 3 degrees now.  Our entire week is going to hover just above 7 or 10 degrees and the nights will be in the minuses.  It is getting to be difficult to stay in so much, but it is Iowa.    Thanks for reading......have a good week.

Show and Tell Saturday.....

A new Christmas ornament for my wife.

I found this in a Coach House store, but I have been admiring them in Christian Bookstores. They are designed by Jim Shore and mass produced in China. The quality is marvelous and even though the original piece is carved in wood the duplicates are not. I want to believe they are hand painted, but I don't know that for sure.
My wife claims I bought it for me to blog about but then she admits she almost bought one for me. I like it's integrity of design, quality of color, and it's over all "wow" appearance. I guess it goes back to my need for three dimensional art work to view.

We are not into the country theme as a dominate design, but our house is old and we have afghans, pottery, and old things everywhere.  This means the country quilt design works so well among our old wood furniture.

The carving detail is so great on this piece. The wings were something I had not noticed until later after I had started taking shots of it.

As it is well done and made in China, I want to balance things by sharing about a local company that has gone big, which creates this kind of work.   Sticks,   http://www.sticks.com/    is a company that Sarah Grant started in 1992 when she was asked to create and sell manger figures carved from wood, in the Better Homes and Garden magazine.  This magazine is published here in Des Moines, and it was one of the magazines first adventures in selling products.  Needless to say, it was a hit, and Sarah Grant had to hire people to help her fill her orders.

When you go on to the Sticks site you can see the products that they make.  The legs on furniture are usually made from fallen trees, left natural, but the rest is decorated with woodburned designs and hand painted.  They create tables that are personalized for families, and will write sayings on them with matching pictures of the interests of the family.  It is an American company that has gone big, as they ship all over the country and the world.

I use to take my students on tours of the factory, but it has gotten so big that they won't allow tours.  Artist sit in large groups and hand paint objects, furniture, and signs.  It is quite a community of workers, each person is allowed to put a little of their personal touch to the pieces, yet restricted to color schemes and style of painting.

http://www.sticks.com/

I borrowed this photo off of the Sticks website and I don't think they will mind as I am promoting their company.  This is a linen chest that they have created.

Enough for show and tell today.   We are actually a -17 degrees F. today.  I will go out to start the car to see if it will but I doubt we will go anywhere today.  The air that I feel when I let the dogs out the door is literally painful to the skin even when I am inside.   Have a good day and thanks for stopping by.....

Faces....

These are faces around the house that I found as I traveled through the house.  I found far more things in our house with a face that I put up today.  As my new year challenge, I dusted off my photoshop skills and made a collage.  This is not an original idea I don't believe so if anyone wants to do this too, I would be pleased to see your faces that you see.

A quiet New Year at home for us with turkey sandwiches and pickles, a feast to behold.  We have one small piece of pumpkin pie left that we will split and I will fill in the gaps with lots of cool whip.

Iowa is going to go into a colder that heck spell for the entire week. I can't understand while the Arctic can't keep it up there to keep there icebergs from melting.  I have an iceberg hanging of my  porch roof right now. Have a good day everyone.  Thanks for stopping by.....

Current temperature   7 degrees F. (-14 C.)
Low last night  -14 degrees F. (-26 C.)
Low tonight -7 degrees F. (-22 C.)

Going by the wayside.........

The bridge was given to me after a prom which had used it for a photo prop. It is about to go away.  It wasn't made to be outside and the floor of it  has rotted through, being made with composite board.  I plan to tear it apart and save the railing and see if I make a new one this spring. I see this is really an old photo as the two pine trees in the back were taken out during the run of the tornado quite a few years ago.

We are closing our frame shop as of today.  It has been 25 years of hard work and a lot of fun too. We have met a lot of people coming through that gallery door but now it is time to stop.  Lots of good reasons to quit, no really good reason to continue as our customers demand so much more these days and would rather we not make any profit. I have a few things to continue working on to get finished but we are not taking in any more new work.

Thanks for stopping by......