Collage Class in the Style of Tim Holtz

This is Simone and Sabyl's Studio in Denver. Once a month we get together to work on a fun Art Project. This week's theme was making a collage using a dicut shape featured somewhere in the work. Tim Holtz has a lot of fun shapes and materials that were available to use in our work.

Simone shows her latest works

Simone brought her dicut machine to make our shapes

Here are some of the finished pieces:

This is my collage called Explore

Christmas in New Jersey/Pennsylvania

Every year we have a big family gathering in Farm country in Bucks County.  We rotate between three homes . This year we had 60 people ages from 1 to 88 years. We have a delicious turkey dinner with every imaginable side dish. The Christmas cookies and fudge are the best.  Here is a pic of their porch with Nancy's canned fruit and vegetables. Her home is so comfortable.

There are so many people we sit in different rooms with our assigned places. Its great to catch up with all our second cousins and their families. Sometimes the highlight is a new calf or rabbits being born that week. 

Here is one of Lucie's Christmas outfits. It was fun to see which one she wore each day. Steve, Lindsey, and Lucie came out East via a car. The drive was over 12 hours. They arrived in NJ on Christmas eve- a day before the rest of us flew in. Lucie was enthusiastically  received by all her cousins and uncles .

Nanny asked each couple to take one night to plan, buy for, and cook a meal. Ashley was not feeling well and instructed Scott and Ian from her recipe.  Note Scott's skill with removing pomegranate seeds. Ian learned how to cut and dice a guacamole. Everyone enjoyed the Kale salad with quinoa and Pesto Chicken. 

Great Nanny got a smile from Lucie. We all had so much joy getting to take our turn holding Lucie. She is such a good baby- never a peep.

Friday we all piled into cars to head over to Manco and Manco's on Ocean City Boardwalk for the best Pizza. Even Lucie got to join in.

We headed to the beach to get our annual portrait.

A stop at Shrivers Salt Water Taffy.

Travel to Ohio for Thanksgiving

We had a very good reason to spend Thanksgiving in Lima Ohio this year. My dear little Lucie Pearl was born in October and we were excited to see and hold her again. I love this photo. She has the most interesting expressions at times.

Steve and Lindsey surprised us with their new dining room table and chairs. They also purchased a new couch so everyone could visit together in the living room. My whole family came for the holiday including Lucie's great-grandparents, Nanny and Poppy from N.J. It was a great time to visit and catch up. Ian flew all the way from California as well. We were anxious to hear about his job offers he was deciding on.

First activity was to get Steve's yard in shape. He hadnt done much raking of leaves, and boy were there alot! Steve bought this new contraption to help pick up the leaves. Here he is demonstrating it. I wanted to do a youtube video on this (even had the camera set up) but he ran away.

Everyone pitched in to help rake for a total of 20 large bags. Even though it was freezing cold we borrowed coats, gloves and hats to get the job done.

Uncle Scott holds little Lucie. Ashley and Scott picked Nanny and Poppy from the airport and came down on Thursday. We cooked and ate our dinner on Friday while being entertained with Steve's You tubes of harried/violent shoppers from black Friday present and past on the TV.

Steve and Lindsey's home. There was plenty of room for us and Ian to stay here. Notice the absence of leaves.

Poppy gets his turn. We cant wait to see Lucie again at Christmas in New Jersey!

Posted with Blogsy

Before Everyone took off we took a Family Christmas Photo. Scott was off running. We missed him.

Saturday Collage Class- in the style of Claudine

This past Saturday our collage class worked with a technique that is well known by Claudine Hellmuth. We started with a black and white photograph copy of a person. Then we added patterned paper, paint, text, or printing.  Everyone's piece came out so different. This is mine.

Ginger showed us a vaseline relief method for our paintings. She applied vaseline over the collaged picture and then painted with crackle paint. She wiped off some of the paint near the vaseline design. It was a neat look!

We meet at Susan and Sabyl's studio downtown denver near Broadway. They set up tables so we can all work. We have the best time chatting while we are creating.

Here are some designs by others.

Susan used lots of people on hers.

Enid found these cool fish to collage on.

Here is Ginger's relief with a circus theme.

Helping in Haiti

For Fall break this year I led a mission trip to Grand Savann Haiti.

Our purpose was to continue with a project to rebuild a school that was destroyed in the Hurricane.

We were there while the bread oven was finished. Rochester Christian Church had been here in April to start the project. We were able to work alongside them and to continue the school construction.

Every morning we started the day with prayer. Two people were chosen to pray in Haitian and two in English.

Here is the church. In the background you can see the school wing we were working on.

We took a walk through their beautiful village. It was surprising how many Voodoo temples were nearby. We prayed with some of the church members and their family.

Here is a before pic, nice and clean early in the morning. We drank so much water and gatorade packets to keep up our strength.

This was the hardest job, making the concrete for the stucco. We had to shake a screen to get very small particles of sand to make the mixture. We built up our muscles!

Linette and I helped the ladies make some yeast bread for their new oven.

In the evening we had our devotions on the rooftop. One night we had this gorgeous sunset.

We had four of us from my school participate in the trip. It was great getting to know everyone. We loved our new best friends.

This was the grounds where we stayed in Christianville. There were people from many different ministries staying here. We all had dinner together and talked about our days.