In a few days Faye & Marge will begin experimenting with some new products and begin the creation process again.  Papier Mache is in our blood now after nearly twenty years and although we have taken a few hiatus' we will never give it up.  So please stay in touch to see what we come up with.  If you have any request's we accept special orders and can create a special gift for your favorite friends' profession, hobby, or interests.  Let us know what you want.  In this image you see a wine lovers delight.

Today's LoveKins

Look What I Found

Oh my gosh, look what I found hiding in my mother's closet.  She told me to take him home so after leaving him there for a couple of weeks, I brought him home so I could make another.  Haven't done that yet but I wanted to share him here anyway.  This is what happens when you don't take photos of everything you make!  And, I mean everything!!!! 

 

I had totally forgotten this guy.  I'm so glad I gave him to my mother because he ended up back with me and now I will probably make a couple more of this design because I do love the smile on this one a lot!  These photos were taken with my cell phone so they're not the best but I still had to post them. 

 

I also had some time this morning.  The grands are sleeping in.....so I am tiptoeing around and had time to read the beginning of this blog and realized that I never quite got around to finishing the story of how Marge and I got started.  That's the one thing about blogs, you are always reading from the end.  LOL  So I really should tell the rest of the story but not this time.  I will leave that for tomorrow. 

Happy 4th of July USA!

Happy 4th of July!  

I ran across some photos of our older santas that really were the beginning of our Santas and Snowmen.  Way way back this is how our santas looked.

Most of these santas were sold at a gallery in Penisula Ohio called Among Friends.  We were so thrilled when Chris and CJ called us artists.  

These are old woodland santas and a couple of our very first snowmen who were sculpted on burned out light bulbs that our families collected and saved for us to use.  I think they're kinda cute and wish I still had a couple of the old snowmen.  Our new snowman are mostly made using recycled plastic bottles now so we still recycle to make our snowmen. 

Our gardening santas were extremely popular, these were ready for an order for the Wizard of Odds in Saddle River, NJ

As our work progressed our santas got more elaborate as well as taller.  

We made and sold almost all the santas.  I wish we had saved a few...my brother has a collection.  I have a couple and Marge has some as well.  I am glad we took so many photos of our work though to remind us just what all we have accomplished.  

These are bad mood bunnies.  Later we sculpted some classical looking rabbits.

Some of our first cats.  

Snowmen for 2013

Thought I would just add some of the new snowman from this past Christmas.  Santa's were sold locally and through craft shows.  If anyone is interested you can contact me with an email.  Thanks

These snowmen pictured above are all new "members of the choir"

I have more new snowmen and santas planned for 2014.

We also design fall scarecrows, witches, and pumpkin snowmen.

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.   

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!  

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.  

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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

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.