Vintage Santas and old doll........

 I surfed the internet for vintage Santa images and am always surprised that so many pop up with Santa smoking and promoting cigarettes.

There were cigarette ads for every popular brand encouraging people to buy everyone on their list cigarettes for Christmas... and Santa was puffing away in every ad.









Pall Mall promised a "smooth" smoke to sooth  "throat scratch" which was probably caused by smoking in the first place.








This Santa is smoking a Turkish brand and looks like he's getting a little high on it.

But Santa ads promoted alcohol as well


The ads from this era really had great Santa images.  They looked as if they were real people and not a Disney version.

But the very best vintage Santa ads were Coke... I love all their Santas. There are endless sites of vintage Coke ads.  In many of other vintage   ads Santa does not look very happy or even very friendly...
































When I start to do my Santas I like to use pictures of happy, friendly old men.... not necessarily easy to find.  I've always wanted to use this photo of Gene Wilder as a Santa and I think this is the year.
.  What I look for is a twinkle in the eye and he has it here. 

Another possibility is Jack Nicolson.  Years and years ago I used a photo of Jack    as a model when I sculpted the head of a gambler doll.. back in the days my son was young and into poker...now it is gathering dust on a shelf and has lost his hand of cards which held 5 aces to back up the aces up his sleeve and under his hat.  It was  a fun doll to make.  Where have the years gone...  Now same son just turned sixty and is into biking with the internet-connected fitness...  I guess I'll dust off the gambler's  hat and see if I can find his cards..

Back on track with cat attack!!!

 Arm is healed, beaded bird book is done until I get new printer cartridges, granddaughter visit is over and I'm bored and ready to dive into something different....  No beads and no jewelry for a while and I'm super ready for a change of pace so I have hauled out "The cat" with a capitol T and determined to tame this one.  I had used my nifty method of transferring the cat image to the back and basted to the front. 

 Today I basted in some tentative line for the grain of the fur and am ready to start.  Now that I have been away from it I can see some fine tuning needed on the eyes first thing. 









Sometimes a break from a project when I am dragging gives me a new approach and energy to get going again.. 

I am determined to work in shorter blocks of times.   In addition I am really missing painting and looked for something happy that could be done on larger MOP discs..  I haven't done any OOAK Santas for 2 years and what could be  happier painting than Santas...... the perfect alternative to working black on black.  These were done in 2016.

I've kept the beaded bird book out just because I love looking at it...  That is the most scrumptious, luscious, lavish, incredible, fabulous brocade I have ever seen. Do you think I like it? Waiting until I get new ink cartridges to finish printing the narrative.  Current cartridges are almost  dead   and I want a nice crisp image.

Hard to believe it came together so well....

It is hard for even me to grasp that in August the blocks in this project had been abandoned for years in a basket in a closet (meant to be used on a jacket) and the beaded pieces had been abandoned in a box under the bed for years.(meant to be used for a mantle display about "Bird Fair".  I'm in the final stages of assembling the pages and here's a close up look at them.

The combined  projects are now a commemorative piece about the "Bird Fair" that the Dept. of Wildlife held one weekend each spring in our garden and drew huge crowds.  I just need to do the narrative to add to the pages.  It's all in a scrapbook so it will not take too long to edit and condense but I want to wait until I get new cartridges for my printer before I print them..I  will use the same technique I used for the narrative in the sheep book.

My Apple Annie

Kitchen has been abuzz since GD Leigha arrived.  She was going to just pick "a few" apples and plans to dry these...that is when the dehydrator is empty from the third batch of plums which are in the metal pan while the second batch is finishing in the dehydrator. Besides the dried plums there must be a gallon of plum nectar in bottles on the counter.  I have very little counter space but she has filled every square inch.

 Her sour dough bread batter is in the mixer.  She brought her own sour dough starter with her from Alaska and packed it in her suitcase...  Unfortunately it exploded in route all over her clothes. We managed to salvage enough to keep the starter going.

She has also wanted to learn to sew and did very well at about every thrift store in town and is repairing or recycling her finds.  Figured the featherweight was the best machine to start her on.










I had some patterns with simple lines and she went through my fabric stash in the barn... Here she is explaining to me how she wants

to layer and coordinate the fabrics she has chosen...  Tomorrow I plan to put her to work in the center part of the barn.

A doll is not just a doll...

Occasionally I have shown a photo of my bedroom and you may have noticed the large print of Berthe Morisot's "Girl with a Doll" which has been with me for years and years.  I was so moved the first time I saw that painting... it was me.... it is really me even though it was painted in 1886.  I only had two dolls in my early years.  We moved constantly during that time following work.  We lived either in a travel trailer or a motel room. Those dolls were more than toys...they were friends and family. 

 

The first doll was Effenbee's Sweetie Pie which I received for Christmas in 1943.  She was composition with a cloth body. She had lamb's wool hair and her eyes opened and closed.  At some point my mother decided I was too old for dolls and she disappeared.  For years and years I searched antique stores for one like her to no avail.  But once Ebay came into existence I was able to replace her.

The second doll was a tiny bisque baby doll I received in 1947. A kind elderly  lady taught me to crochet about that time and I used tatting thread to crochet outfit after outfit  for it.  When I left for college the shoe box of all her outfits disappeared but I still have the doll.  It sits on a antique buffet in the living room. Once grown my love affair with dolls continued.  I started making dolls for my kids and my grandchildren but none ever seemed to care about dolls like I did.  So at some point I started making dolls for myself and I have them everywhere.

I tell you all this for a purpose.  Some time back I joined a CQ round robin where each stitcher picked her own theme and I picked paintings of girls with dolls and I ran across those blocks yesterday.  I had never done anything with them because I  always meant to repeat that RR so I would 10-11 blocks and it never happened.

 

I still have images for about 15 more paintings of girls with dolls and am trying to decide if I want to find a way to use them all.....brain in gear!!!

 

This is my year for granddaughter bonding.  My granddaughter Leigha from Alaska just arrived for a nice long visit.  She recently finished nursing school and is spending time with us before she starts a new job and new chapter in her life. Today we went to the public market, a festival and visited some gardens.  She is going to help me with some projects and I am going to teach her how to sew.