~:: 2014 Ornament Bash ::~

okay.

I can’t remember when we started this party.  I think it was probably 1979. I may have explained explained the origins of this crazy n0w-tradition in other posts; my father and mother (I really I have to say this surprises me; my folks didn’t do these things when I was growing up) – started having this party when he was an LDS bishop, for the friends my parents worked with at church all the time. Just a silly kind of an ornament white-elephant party. People brought all kinds of funny stuff.  Like a Popsicle snowflake with the words, “wrong side – turn this side towards tree” painted on the back.  I loved that thing.  It was the seed of my own party.  And I own it now myself and cherish it mightily.

So the first real year we were in the house, we invited our dear kindred-spirit crazy friends – gathered from all our various walks of life (studio, university, missions, church – ) and had this party, which we have had ever since – with basically the same kindred spirits.  Not all of them are crafts people. Some are artists.  Some hate making things. Some hate the party and find it a source of extreme anxiety every flipping Christmas season – and some are trixters who have to be held close in hand.

So here is this year’s bash.  I’m really amazed at how little I’ve written in this blog over the last two years – but the party cannot go unposted, come high water or heck – so here we go.

 These are just tiny little peppermint wrens.  The idea of using red ticking for birds was triggered by a cover of Molly Makes, a magazine I cannot afford and that has about three brilliant ideas for every thirty pages of ads.  My birds are not like the one on the cover.  The birds in my head were just something I had to try.  And, of course, you can’t make just one.  The first one tells you if this is something that grows in your hand or not.  And the second one begins the experimentation – what if you use this?  What if you shape this part that way?

 I am not a careful craftswoman.  For me, neat and elegant  finishing is totally trumped by the achievement of character.  As I write this, I realize that character is the most important thing for me.  Also, now I think of it, I wish I were a lot free-er and more slapdash in the shapes and construction.

 Anyway, if you go to the trouble of working out a pattern for yourself and finding a process – how can you walk away making just one?  Or five?  Or twelve?  And the truth is, I’d want to make as many of something as it would take to give each of the people I love. Which I can’t.  So I make at least several.  Mostly all different.  At least, sometimes.  And because they are different, I always want to keep them all.  Which I don’t actually do.  Mostly.

This is the guy I made for the party.  He’s (she’s?) a couple of times bigger than those little guys above.  And now the actual party stuff starts:

Jeff’s button snowman.

 Now, I don’t know if this was actually Jeff’s, or if he cheated.  Many people cheat, causing their partner or child to make the party offering.  Or even buying things off kids in their classes, or finding things on the library floor.  Mostly, it’s male persons who do this.  But not always.  So. Jeff’s.  Or maybe Peg’s.  Please be advised that leaving comments after this blog can be useful in making a case of self-defense.

Many thanks to Chelsea.  I was pretty sick the day of the party – but prepared.  Probably the most prepared for the thing I’d ever been.  Luckily.  Because Gin and the kids showed up like magic on my doorstep in the morning, for one thing – and stupidly upper-resp sick for the other.  So I wan’t my usual obnoxiously dynamic self.  I was going to be lucky to remain relatively upright through the evening.  And Cam’s kids had gotten sick, to, so he wasn’t going to be there, either. Luckily Chelsea was there, and she stepped in to do the camera work.  Then the camera got sick. I still don’t know what was wrong with it.  So Steve Perry saved the day with his phone, shooting things as they went by with Johanne’s back as a back drop.  Otherwise, there’d be no images, and I’d be doing something else right now.

I don’t do a lot of commenting on the captions.  So here is a general statement: I LOVE all these things.

 Lynn cunning little bird.  This sweet little guy was a much better blue than the lighting allowed.  The feet: I wish you could see them better. Love the feet.

Bob’s woodcarved two turtle doves – above with recalcitrant camera, below with Steve’s phone:

Chelsea’s tiny stocking. We love charm and detail.

One of the things we love is when the ornament that comes with a person kind of embodies that person’s passions and life.  This miniature gingerbread house is exactly that kind of work: Kathy’s.

(This is Steve’s phone cam detail.On this page you can always tell Steve’s shots by the sweater.  I love that sweater.)

Char wasn’t doing that hot that evening either.  So we got to open this tree of hers and then she absconded, heading for home and bed.

Laura Hickman. All crochet.  Well, not the bead parts.  I don’t know how you do this.

Lynn – paint on glass ball.  Jerusalem.  Steve caught the detail:

Terry always does this minuscule petite point.  Is that redundant? Yes. Here we have front and back.  Steve got a little closer, so his front follows:

See?  This is just an example of male-cop-out.  Yes, I know that we have these little problems we’ve got to deal with in our hum-drum lives.  But really, couldn’t Tracy have just gotten Laura to teach him how to crochet instead of covering him with her brilliant self?

Johanne’s driftwood Santa.  Wait.  Johanne – did you do two ornaments?  Steve, is this yours?  Not confused at all here.

Meridee’s  quilted, paper-pieced tree.  teeny-weeny paper piecing.  Tassel.  We LOVE tassels. And trees.  And paper piecing.

Above and below: Brian’s hand made sled. I fought for this.  I lost.  He has not made me one since.  Just sayin’.  He better have made Rachel one.

Debbie always does whimsical mobiles. This one – well there’s a story.  Bob came in through the front door, laden with food and packages and handed the packages to me.  But he let go before I got gripped, and one of the pages fell straight down to the entry floor. Just went down like an elevator.  And hit the floor with a pretty solid thunk.  He looked at me and said, “This is not good.  It’s Debbie’s.”  And sure enough, when we opened it, there were a lot of disembodied ears in there.  So what you are seeing here is a composite.  It’s easier to stick ears back on in PhotoShop than it is in real life.  Debbie – I am SOOOOO sorry.

Dick always cheats.  Always. It’s an actual thing. Meaning: he did not make this.  I just hope he actually paid for it.   Johanne took it home and hung it in her living room.

Ginger, who travels the world in ways only National Geographic knows, brought back these beetle wings.  I don’t know where they came from, but they are not home-grown.  Comments at the end of this blog can also count as footnotes.  As well as reviews,  kibitzing, commentary, explanation. If you bother to make them.  Which, you know – would be good.   The beaded part was not part of the original animal.  Can you believe the sheen?

Gaye’s baby Jesus.  May I point out, Gaye, that this is not a quilt?  And I was going to give you back the tree with your grandmother’s buttons on it.  You should have that.

Jeannie came without David.  Surely he was ill, for nothing else would have kept him from us.  She brought two fused glass trees. This is only one of them.  I need to fuse some more. I never made anything as lovely as this.

We have a couple of actual working visual artists among us.  They make it look so easy. This is Sam’s woodburned ball.  I fought for this, too.  Nobody gives me any respect.   Sam promised to make me one, but I am third in line after Marilyn and Ginna and don’t really have a prayer.  In the last round of the wild card, there was nearly a brawl.  I felt better when Ginna ended up with it. BUT —

Ginna didn’t keep it for long.  After she had taken possession, Lucy took it into her own hands and loved it and was very happy with it.  It became completely and wholly Lucy’s.

Can you see it in Lucy’s widdo hands???  She was laughing and cooing and loving it and then the EVIL GAYE got the wild card and DEMANDED THE BABY’S LITTLE TOY.  Do you see this child’s face?  I wish I’d been on top of this – Chelsea caught this face, but you should have seen the way Lucy subsequently glared RIGHT AT GAYE.  And GAYE, having 4000 grandkids, didn’t bat a flipping eyelash.

Heartless woman.

Ginna’s joyful origami star.

Okay. Pretty sure some cheating went on here.  Cause Rebecca and Danny both showed up with these cheerful “He’s the Gift” trees.  Plaster and paint.

Mark and Tricia also teamed up.  There were two of these cool shell guys.

Melissa, elegant and a bit steampunk as always.

Laura’s whimsical penguins.  So yeah, my SON cheats, too.  This guy holds a snowball.

This guy is having a long winter’s nap.  Felt with embroidery.

Peg’s button Christmas tree.  What a swell little guy.

 Rachel was laughing even before she showed me this dude – long before the party.  She says, “Everybody needs a Christmas wooly mastodon. ”

Marilyn always does a set of guys.  Star Wars once.  These are the Wizard of Oz.  Blood was lost over these.

Melanie made this tiny book.  And here’s the deal.  Char, who left because she was ill, had been #1 in the game, which also meant that she should have had the choice to chose very last of all.  That’s one part of the story.  In my own family – starting long ago when I was very, very young – my father, with his wonderful voice and style, used to read this book to us every single year at Christmas.  It would take nights and nights, and he’d always end up mad because we kids fidgeted and messed around while he was reading; he had no idea that not only did we hear and love every word, we were practically memorizing the work word for word, and would grow up to be able to read it in just exactly the way he had read it to us.  Which I did with my family until they were all too old and didn’t live here anymore.

So the game wore on –  long because there were some pretty significant battles waged – and we got down to the very last present.  Johanne had won this little book earlier and was pretty confident that she’d be taking it home, but Chelsea, still slaving away over the camera, leaned over and whispered to me – a Great Plan.  Since Chaz should have chosen very last, Chelsea was going to choose for her – and she did, and stole the little book for Charlotte – with no one after her to take it away again. I am fairly certain that Chaz got choked up when Chelsea later put it into her hand.

Johanne’s Santa.  A revisiting of a guy she’d made – really – like almost thirty years ago.  I have the original. Can we really have been on the planet for so long?  Were we really ever that young?  As long as there are no mirrors, though – and our joints don’t ache, we still think we’re that young.

Kara’s gnome.

Enough to start several wars.

Did I mention character and detail?

Guy has decided that he’s in the middle of a series.  He gets no end of fun out of fussing over the beads and trying to fit them on this fat wire.  Cedar.

Lind may hate the party and hate having to make things, but he always does incredible things.  If I’d won this, I’d have given it to Meridee.

Mark’s Snowman at Night – from Mark and Kara’s beautiful book.  I do not know what this is made of or how it was done.  Don’t you love a good mystery?

And there we are.  The mess of us.  So many jolly friends crowded into our house – growing old together (HA).  It makes the season for us, filling the place with human Christmas cards.  Love and joy and uproariousness.  If the house were bigger, there would be more folks in the picture.  Then again, not everybody can stand this kind of pressure in the middle of the holidays, and far be it from me to cultivate apoplexy in a dear friend.  At least,  no more often than necessary.

 

Bonus cuts:  Me in my natural habitat

Bossing

And  shooting.

Wearing Char’s gift-to-me shirt and  Rachel’s hand knit socks with red and white toes. And a fitbit.