Tessandore Creative

Holiday Evenings

Did a little present wrapping and tree decorating tonight.  Now it's time so sit down with some hot spiced cider and gingerbread - my favorite.  Yum.

I had forgotten about this cute little felt reindeer I got last year.  Found her at the feed store actually, when I was buying chicken food.  The angel beside her is an ornament my mom and I made when I was a little kid.  Crafty runs in my family.  :)
I'm feeling more Chistmas-y now that school's out for the semester.  But last weekend was fun too - my school had a movie night...
"'Tis the season to be jolly and joyous...fa la la la!"  I've loved the Muppet Christmas Carol for ages, but had never seen it on the big screen.  It has a great soundtrack + what's better than the muppets?!  The school did a good job arranging the event too.  Before the show they had craft tables set up for kids to make paper-bag puppets.  I wanted to go make one too, but reluctantly restrained myself and left the craft supplies for the little ones.  What a good night though.

xo ~ k

Nice Mice

Isn't she a sweetie?  She's all tucked-in to a walnut shell.  :)  I remembered when I was a kid that my mom & I had made some little ornaments like this, although it seems like we made babies in shells instead of mice. If you want to go that route, it's easy to paint a cute face on a wooden bead to use for the baby face.  For the mice I decided to make needle-felted faces.  Here's what you need to make the ornaments:

• Walnut shell halves
• Little squares of fabric (about 2.5" square)
• Cotton balls
• Embroidery thread
• Trim 
• Silver or Gold chord
• Aleene's Tacky glue
• Toothpicks
• Ball Point sewing pins
• Wool Roving & felting needles

First, I wrapped the fabric around part of a cotton ball.  Depending on the size of your shell and how "stuffy" you want your bed to look, you might only need a tiny bit of cotton.
Before gluing anything down, I fit the fabric-wrapped cotton ball into the shell to make sure the size was ok.  Then I took everything out, put glue around inside the shell and used a toothpick to help get everything tucked back in.
I picked out some coordinating trim and glued that down to cover the flat edge of the shell.
After I needle-felted the tiny mouse face, I played around with the blanket edge to make sure the she would look sufficiently nestled.  Then I cut a little piece of embroidery thread for the tail (all 6 strands) in a color that coordinated with her nose.  To keep the strands together, I put a tiny bit of glue on my fingers and twisted the ends of the thread strands together through the glue.  To attach the tail I pulled the blanket away from the shell, put a bit of glue in there and tucked the end of the tail in with a toothpick. 
I put some glue in the shell where her head would be and placed a loop of silver chord down before I glued the head in.  The chord gives you a place from which to hang the ornament.  Last, I placed two black sewing pins for eyes.  They look pretty cute and they also help to hold everything together tightly while the glue dries.

Now I have a whole bunch of mice on my work table...
You can also leave the trim off if you want to see the edge of the shell.  This was my favorite little one...
Happy crafting!

~ k

♥

Sweets

Normally, we don't have this much candy in the house.  Really!  :)   This weekend though, we set up to decorate...
Gingerbread houses! 

I've wanted to make one for years, but never quite get around to baking the house.  Since they had these cute & already assembled ones at the grocery store, I decided to take advantage and jump right to the fun part.

  ♥

Solstice

Light is on the way!  At this time of year in Alaska, we greet the morning in the dark and drive home from work in the dark.  Winter solstice is that important pivot point after which we finally start gaining light again.  I do love Alaska, but if I ever leave - the dark may have more to do with it than the cold.  So welcome Solstice!

And with just a few days until Christmas, I though I'd share this year's tree:
 Hope this winter day finds you cozy and happy.  ♥

Warm and Merry Christmas Eve!

I'm not quite back yet officially, but wanted to share this little story by John Henry Falk.  You can read the story on this page, but it's so much better to hit the "listen now" button and enjoy!

Ok, as long as I'm here I might as well show you the felted stocking I made:

Cute, aye?  It love that little toe!  I bought these wool sweaters from Value Village (the one with the X is the one used for the stocking).  After thinking it through for awhile, I decided it was best to sew the stocking shape into the sweater - but not cut it out - before felting it.   Then all the sweaters were felted using these directions.

When it came out of the wash, I was able to just cut around my seam, then turn it right side out and shape it a bit.  I also used some of the scraps to make this little cookie-cutter garland.

I'm hooked on this process now and working on making a little Christmas tree that I'll show you next time.  If you're interested, here's some info on why things "felt".

Merry Christmas!
(p.s. the tree we bought sooo early this month made it all the way to Christmas still alive - yay!)

Eggnog Latte kinda day

Soon, soon I'll be back with new drawings and little bits and things.  But for now the Holidays have taken over - we got our Christmas tree tonight!  The earliest ever.  I'm not entirely sure it will still be alive by the 25th, but we really wanted a real tree this year (instead of pulling the sad, fake one out of the closet) and also wanted the whole month to enjoy it.  Cozy, no?

And right smack in the middle there is this little sticker by Lori Brown:

I did, by the way, have an Eggnog Latte this morning.   All in all - a pretty fine day.  Hope you had the same!

Welcome December!

After taking a day off, I'm back in gear with the making-of-things and have just packaged up my first delivery of holiday baking...

Which so far includes:

***click on the words above to download a pdf of the recipe***

And...

The Guinness Cake is one of my favorites.  It's not too sweet...almost tastes like a light gingerbread.  And it's sooo yummy with cream cheese frosting!  (But kind of hard to wrap up that way.)  The recipe comes from Nigella Lawson's Feast.  A wonderful cookbook by a fabulous woman.  Can I be her when I grow up?  :o)

Do you recall?

The most famous reindeer of all? 

Ok, that's too easy.  But what about the other names? This became a topic today and we did finally remember all of them. 

Now Dasher! Now Dancer! Now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!

Then we tried for the names of all 7 dwarves...which we couldn't quite get without the help of the internet.  I'll put them at the end of this post.  Can you get them without peeking?

But, really what I wanted to announce today is - my tote-bags finally arrived!  The fine folks at CafePress sent them out lickety-split, but the mail service took them on a little tour of Washington before getting them to my door step.


I just love that sunny girl!  She's kind of become my mascot.  I'm going to sew a lining into one of the bags and {hopefully} get it posted for sale in the shop in the next couple weeks.  Wish me luck with my sewing machine!  I used it on my bird, but other than that - no experience.

Before I get to the dwarf names, here's another list that could come in handy this time of year:

Twelve drummers drumming
Eleven pipers piping
Ten lords a-leaping
Nine ladies dancing
Eight maids a-milking
Seven swans a-swimming
Six geese a-laying
Five gold rings
Four calling birds
Three French hens
Two turtle doves
And a partridge in a pear tree

And now, without further delay:

Happy
Dopey
Grumpy
Sleepy
Sneezy
Bashful
& Doc

I never gave it much thought, but now realize that these came only from the Disney movie - in older versions of the tale, the dwarves weren't named.   According to Wikipedia, the Disney names were chosen from a pool of about fifty potentials.  Among them: Blabby, Jumpy, Shifty, Scrappy, Cranky, Dirty, Awful, Silly, Daffy, Flabby, Jaunty, Biggo Ego, Chesty, Bald, Gabby, Nifty, Sniffy, Burpy, Lazy, Puffy, Dizzy, Stuffy and Tubby.  Being Wikipedia, I'll take that list with a grain of salt.  But they're pretty funny!

Exhausting the possibilities...

As I originally intended her to be...

I'll keep this an extra-short post...the fox and tree have a good idea - time for some shut-eye!  Sweet dreams...

Swirly Sky

Here's the drawing I was working on last night.  I was going to color the whole thing (and may still) but I really like how it came out with just the night sky.  I painted the sky with acrylics & photographed it while it was still wet to give a little sparkle.  Kinda neat.

I'm researching my square button options this week, so maybe soon you'll see a few in my shop.  Yay!

While working tonight I was listening to:  Damien Rice, Paolo Nutini and a little Kate Havnevik.  All good "makin' stuff" music I'd say.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Christmas!  Well, not outside it's not...no snow yet!  But I wanted to get a start on a little Christmas card.  Here's the cozy scene from my table tonight...

Yes, in the corner is the bird I was working on a week ago - still no feet!  Poor bird.