Morey’s painted Weblog

The holidays are whirling around at light speed! November included birthdays, anniversaries, holidays and unexpected days off from school. OK, so the days off from school weren’t unexpected by my son, just by me. I have to learn to read the school calendar at least more than two days before the start of a holiday week. My twelve year old son has a bit of trouble understanding that just because he has the day off doesn’t mean that I do too. Poor kid, I had him running errand all week.

As I may have posted before, this year’s gift giving is a lot of handmade items. While I am making many things, I have also been buying some on Etsy. I have found some wonderful gifts including marshmallow guns made by Boy Toys. They are so cool! It is a great site for boys gifts. I am still on the hunt for a gift for my beloved, Chip. His personal style is pretty conservative, so most of the men’s items on Etsy aren’t a good match for him. I did find this shop and love the simple elegance of the designs. Plus the picture of Carl himself makes me want to buy anything the man is selling. He seems charming!

As you might recall, I was doing the messy work of making dried pomander balls. 6 weeks later, they are finally done. I only seemed to have one tentative failure. One of the apples is still a little spongy, so that one may have to be tossed. I have been wrapping them in beautiful Christmas ribbons and enhancing them with spiced essential oils. I will be giving them as gifts, hanging them on my tree and selling them on Etsy as well as a shop in downtown Chicago (more on that later). This is how they look now:

As I said, this is the holiday to create things. Besides the pomander balls, I ave also been making tons of other items. Ornaments are the item most in demand, so I have made these:

Again, all these are available on Etsy and in a downtown Chicago Christmas store.

Ah yes, the downtown store. I was sent an email the other day asking if I would like to show some items in a store full of handmade holiday goodies. I am bringing a whole bunch of stuff there on Thursday, and hopefully I will sell well. I am making many more things as I type, and I will blog on them when I have finished them.

October blew by so fast that I was hardly able to notice it! Suddenly this morning I realised that we are almost at Thanksgiving! I am cooking at my home this year which always makes me happy. Christmas will be upon us sooner than we know. The highlight of my month was when my niece and nephew came out for Halloween to trick or treat with my son.

And speaking of Christmas, I am working on a new premise this year. The economy is horrific. While I believe that our president elect will do a great job working to get us back on track, it will not happen over night and certainly not in the 6 weeks before Christmas. So this year I am trying to gift hand-made. I have plenty of items made over the last year to make many wonderful gifts and those I don’t make will come from Etsy as much as possible. Most of us on the site know that what we create are luxury items, but the money you spend there isn’t a luxury to the artist who receives it. It pays the bills. So I beg you all to support them!

One of my holiday projects goes back to when I was a youngster. As I mentioned in other posts, I worked for a very talented, creative soul named Joel Cobb. Every year, right around mid October, his store started to get this wonderful spicy smell. He was making his annual batch of pomander balls. Traditionally, pomander balls were objects attached to clothing during Elizabethan times so that they might be conveniently held to the nose to disguise the smell of unwashed bodies and to ward off illness. The pomanders were usually round, and were made of ceramic with holes to release the sent of oils and/or spices. Eventually, pomanders became clove studded fruits, some left open to scent a space temporarily or rolled in spice to eventually dry out hand become a permanently scented ornament. The ones I have always make are the latter.

To make these are more time consuming that you would imagine. I spent about 10 hours studding various fruits with cloves. The thicker the skin, the harder it is to insert a clove, even when you pre-puncture the skins as I did. And it is a sticky job, with juice running down my hands. But I smelled wonderful!These are the fruit as I was half way through studding them:

After all the fruit was done, I took advantage of all those sticky juices. To dry pomanders, you have to roll them in dried spices and then sort of bury them in a bowl with more spice. Drying in spices is not a new concept. Before refrigeration foods would be cured in spice much the way food was cured with salt. The mixture is traditionally cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and allspice mixed together with ground orris root. Orris root is key to the drying process, as it helps to draw moisture out of the fruit to evaporate. I have made them without it, but with mixed results. Usually I had some rotten fruit among the drying ones. Think of orris root as a drying additive.  This is the curing state:

They are still in the process of drying, but they sure do smell good! At first the orris root was the strongest smell – a scent similar to violets. But now that had toned way down and there is a wonderful spiced fruit smell. I have to turn and rotate the fruits every 5-7 days. I do this so that no moisture gets trapped and creates mold. At the end of about 6 weeks, they will be hard and dry. I will dust them down with a chip brush and tie them with bows.

I have been hard at work on my etsy store the last few weeks. I lovelovelove Etsy! I spend far too much time searching their Treasury listings. Treasury listing are pages of items selected and grouped by Etsy members. Getting a list slot can be a bit of a challange since you have to watch as listings expire down to less than 333 lists, and then everyone jumps on the link to make one at the same time and the list volume bumps up really high, often over 600! I happened to time it right today and got one. For anyone interested, it is Autumn Wonders. Autumn has always been my favorite time of year. Like many kids, my sister and I would jump into the leaf piles my dad raked up, but only when he wasn’t looking. In highschool, I was a member of AFS and each year we would go apple picking to get the apples that we candied and sold at the football games every year. The fall of my senior year, another school’s AFS club came with us. They had some very cute boys in their club and we girls followed them like puppies. They, in turn, worked to impress us with their amazing tree climbing abilities and battled to find the biggest apples.  Somehow several of us got completely separated from the rest of the group and found ourselves in an area empty of pickers and trees full of gorgeous fruit. Two of the boys started climbing and picking, tossing the apples down to the closest girl. Suddenly a cranky old man on a tractor came riding up to us, yelling and waving a rake. It would seem that we had gone beyond the area where public picking was allowed, into the commercial harvesting area.  A bunch of rowdy teens were not welcome. Something else unwelcome was that there was poison ivy around most of the trees. Since it wasn’t open to the public, the orchard didn’t worry about it too much. Our dashing tree-climbers, however, were far less dashing as they scratched all the way home.

I have also FINALLY gotten my domino jewelry back on Etsy. I have made a ton of new stuff and will be adding it over the next few weeks. I have done some new pattern, like this Geisha and these Hula Girls

As well as some new colors, like Smoke and Red

And, as always, if you see a pattern you like, but not the color, just send me a note and I will make it for you.

I’ve also finally photographed andother batch of ATCs. These were from a Mask swap for Halloween.  I love all the different mediums. I am still loving the crackle on photos, especially black and white ones, the best. I love the way it pulls the ink a little, changing the colors subtly.

I love these images!