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.

New Snowmen

Just adding a few new snowmen to our page.  Facebook seems to not be working for me right this moment so I will put them up here.

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!

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!  

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.  

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.   

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.