Sunday, November 6, 2011

Oophs

I keep forgetting to show off the newest snowmen ornaments.  OOAK hand sculpted, hand painted and then dusted with glitter by me.  I've been calling them Wallee & Jollee.  oh and they are guaranteed not to melt when spring arrives.  I swear they will remain their cheerful, glittery, snowselves.  Promise!


Friday, November 4, 2011

Wide Body Snowmen


Introducing the newest wide bodies on the block.  These jolly snowmen are all wide bodies fashioned papier mache, hand painted...with various pieces added to each one.  I debated whether to glitter or not to glitter...so I glittered a bit and left the snow off of some and added it to others.  Now to find names for the fellows.  Suggestions are welcome!  










Monday, October 31, 2011

Witches, Scarecrows, Pumpkins & More...



Indeed A Day Late seems to be my theme song.  I am also more than a dollar short in what I've paid to finish off these new OOAK designs.  I just finished off a couple of scarecrows and a witch, but why?  I'm a day late if I want to sell them, maybe that's why I'm a day late, I don't want to sell any of them.


  

(Isn't this little Pumpkin Scarecrow cute?  I added some glitz, a sign and a crow!)


These 3 LoveKins have been finished for more than a month, but I just never found the time to take the photos and reduce pixels and resize for Etsy.  I had to read the help files on Etsy to fine the optimum photo size...it's 570 pixels wide.  If I were really into this resizing of photos I would write a script to have my photo program automatically do this....however I checked into it and it's not worth the battle.   So I resized a whole group of photos to Etsy size of 570 pixels...I hope that's the correct size, my memory is gone or partially gone.

I think it's probably too late to sell these 3 so hooray for me, my private collection just grew by 3!
Here's the witch, all glittered up and spooky!  She's a lovely green color don't you think?

Full sized Scarecrow is 12 inches tall, he sports some lovely pumpkins and an old black crow.  







Saturday, October 22, 2011

OOAK

OOAK??  Ok so it took me a bit to figure that out and start adding it to our designs.  OOAK stands for one of a kind.  Oh yeah, now I understand and thought maybe I should explain it to anyone who doesn't know.
This is a group of our early santas and snowmen.  I would like to have one of each!

Almost all our work is OOAK, made by hand without the use a mold.  We do produce more than one of certain designs but each one is still done by hand individually.  Sometimes they look close but no two are exactly the same because they really are ooak.  


Take this little santa, he stands about 7 inches tall and is similar in style to other santas we have sculpted.  However this little guy has a different interior, his base is aluminium foil bent and twisted and formed and then covered with a mache base.  The mache for this santa was from Jonni Good's recipe on the Ultimate Paper Mache.   I love the stuff, Marge not so much as me so for now we are using Jonni's recipe along with a commercial product called Celluclay.    When we started this way back in 1994, 1995 we used Celluclay exclusively.  However upon restarting our sculpting projects found the cost of Celluclay along with our bases to be extremely expensive.   I was excited when I found Jonni's website and all the different recipes for paper mash, paper mache.   

Friday, October 21, 2011

The Berkshires & Cape Cod

I know it's been some time since my last post here, but life happens and sometimes that interferes with plans.   Anyway we've been working away on some new designs for Christmas.  Plus we sold some of our  OOAK Santas and ornaments to the gift shop at The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  If you're in the area stop by and take a peek at them.

The Santa in the middle of this photo looks quite a bit like the santa in the movie "The Polar Express".  Marge added the Believe sign to him because that's what the movie was about.  He was indeed OOAK.  The Red Lion Inn picked him for their collection. 

The ornaments are similar to this fellow,


Or these:



Here's one of our Santas that we won't sell but may at some time try to do another one similar.  He's ooak nautical Santa and looked perfect in Cape Cod where I took this photo.









Monday, March 21, 2011

Time Flies

Goodness time sure flies when you're busy.  I've been slow updating this blog.  I have no excuse other than I hate winter in Ohio just like I can't stand sinus infections that just hang around for the winter because it's Ohio and it's cold and raining and then freezing and snowing.  Despite that we've been busy working on some bunnies and stuff for Easter or year round if you like bunnies.  The bunnies are a return featuring some bad attitudes and some new styles as well.

Still no photo of Marge to share.  I guess I need to resort to blackmail.


The Bunnies are for sale on our Etsy Shop


Bad Attitude Bunny

You can find all these in our Esty Store!  


Friday, February 4, 2011

A Name? A Name!




A name, a name or is that a brand?  Back in the day when we started it was a name so that's what I will call it.  So along with those little card tags, we needed a name, something to call our creations. But it wasn't easy picking out a descriptive name for our adorable, cute, amazing sculpted papier mache santas or our other projects.  Marge however thought up the perfect name when she put together our names Love and Haskins and came up with LoveKins.  Sheer brilliance on her part.  I was still working on This or That.  Once we had the LoveKins name decided upon we needed to put together our cards.

Back in the beginning we never thought to use one of our own photos for the card.  Nor did we have the software or the know how to make our own.  I mean this was almost before computers.  Yes we are old enough to remember word processors.  Although we had computers at the time, we just didn't have the confidence in what we could do.  So we packed up our script and a santa photo we liked and drove over to Kinkos in Akron to have our cards printed.


New card back, however the script is almost the same as what we had on our first card.




A few of our first ornaments.  In the beginning we couldn't make enough of these little guys.  
We liked using a certain kind of glass ornament because of the gold top.  I know, we tended to get side tracked just a bit.  I rememeber we went shopping after Christmas one year looking for those specific glass ornaments to use for our sculpted santa faces.  The glass ornaments were quite expensive even back then but we found lots of them at a Lighthouse Pool Store.  They were half price at the time around 2.50 for a box of 6, we were excited about that, what a deal.  I think our salesman asked why were buying them and we started talking to him about the ornaments.  In the end I think we purchased a hundred boxes of those ornaments for a dollar a box.  I know we still to this day have some of those ornaments and are still using them as a base for our faces. 


This is an ornament I made in 2010 and yes it has that gold top.  

Look for this ornament our Etsy Store. 

That's all for today's blog, the grands are awake and it's time for breakfast.  

.  

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Wide Body Snowmen

I am so happy to announce a new snowman for our line of snowfolks.  He's a new wide body design.  I love him and I'm not sure when we'll put him up for sale if at all.  First we need to design a whole group of friends for him.

Here's a close up of the jolly guy.  He's probably happy here in NE Ohio today since the rain has stopped and the snowing has started all over again.  He's about 9" tall and 4 1/4" wide so hence the wide body name.  
Here's a full length shot of the happy gent.  


He'll probably also sport a cardinal somewhere on his hat but I don't have any right now to use so he's just sporting his long muffler and a few sparkles.  

Next up I hope to get back to the story of our beginnings and how we came up with a name for our creations.  
Until then stay warm and dry....
Faye


Thursday, January 27, 2011

They Called Us the Santa Ladies, Part 2

Well it took me some time but I finally tracked down some photos of earlier santas including one of the soccer santa that started the journey.  I'm sad that neither one of us kept a single one of the soccer santas.
Soccer Santa
We should have, I wish we could have kept at least one of all of them but instead we sold them and tried to take a photo of each one of them.  Sadly that didn't happen either or it wouldn't have taken me so long to track down Soccer Santa.  As it was I had to crop 3 other santa ornaments from this photo.  
3 other Santas in original photo.
As you can see this is the backside of 3 santa ornaments.  I have NO idea why we wanted that but I'm thankful we did and that Soccer Santa snuck into the photo uninvited.  Another happy mistake, we did seem to rely a lot on those happy mistakes.  So to continue the story of the beginnings of all this.  After working on so many different santas in additon to the soccer santa, we started looking around for a store or place to sell our santas in addition to the soccer games.  We also thought we needed a card to attach to the santas, one that told a bit about who we were and how we designed our santas.  We had No idea what was in store for us because of those cards.  
This is our current card since I haven't scanned the old one into the computer yet.
This is pretty much the same text only the photo has improved to one of "our" Santas.
Something we never would have had the courage to do way back in the beginning of this adventure.  
2 of our really early santas.   These were from a tutorial we followed.
Of course we quickly discovered we could make much more detailed Santas.
I think we sold these at a little antique's store in Bath the first time we really took our santas out of a box.
We were very surprised, shocked and excited that evening, but I've gotten ahead of myself with the story.  





Saturday, January 22, 2011

They called us the Santa Ladies

Way back at the start of this journey, my friend and I were just trying to find a craft project for another friend's Christmas craft show.  I had always painted and worked on different craft projects but my friend and partner was looking for something she could do as well.  Whenever I suggested painting she refused, couldn't do it.  So I was surprised when she agreed to help me sculpt Santas out of Celluclay a commercial  papier mache product.

We took orders on one of our first Santas at our daughters soccer games.  As I recall the santas were on light bulbs and each of the bags had a soccer ball prominently featured.  I think all told we made more than 20 of those little santas.  During the beginning of all this my partner had refused to do the painting so I had agreed to paint all the santas she sculpted.  But when I told her one day that the santas really came to life when you were painting them, specifically painting the eyes, she reluctantly agreed to give it a try.  She was so good at sculpting right from the beginning and she became an excellent painter as well.

Sometimes you just don't know what you can do until you try.