Advent Calendars, a Favorite Holiday Tradition

my hand-painted advent calendar

December 1st marks the start of my Christmas season.  Time to pull out the Advent Calendar.  When we were children, Mom would buy the cardboard calendars with little doors, some had candy, the one I remember most simply had the Christmas story told over 24 days.  As a childless adult, I'd abandoned the tradition until I happened upon the tree-shaped calendar with little boxes I wrote about back in 2013.  I love trying to find fun, new ways to fill each day; ways to awaken my holiday spirit.

The boxes are small, a little over an inch square, so it's kind of tricky finding things that will fit.  I had a great time searching Pinterest for ideas. Some of my favorites:

 *  Krista's Christmas Countdown Activities
 *  Coffee Cups & Crayon's Random Acts of Kindness calendar. 
 *  Idealist Mom - lots of ideas for fun little activities and do it yourself advent calendars. 

All of these blogs have free printables, (and several have links to their Etsy stores).  But one of my favorite pins - a nicely written compilation of the nativity story - didn't link to a current site. So I decided to make my own version - a set of little "books", and while I was at it, I decided to make a separate set for Clement Clarke Moore's, The Night Before Christmas. 

And in the spirit of Christmas, I thought I would share.

I saved the designs in three separate PDF files:

Nativity Story, Page 1

Nativity Story, Page 2

Night Before Christmas

If you'd like the original Illustrator files so you can do your own editing, let me know and I'll send you a link.





I then trimmed the pages into separate strips

Trimming the pages into separate strips

Then folded the strips into thirds, making sure my first fold fell between the two text blocks, and my second between the text block and the little number (the numbers help me keep the finished books in their proper sequence).

Folding the strip into thirds

Check to make sure all three sections are the same width.  I'd forgotten to trim the left-most edge for several of strips.  So I had to do that next.  The simplest way to mark where to trim is to fold the two ends in towards the center and mark the overhanging edge.

Marking the left edge so I can trim it away.

Next I accordion-folded the left and center sections.

accordion folding the first two sections

I finished the book by wrapping the 'cover' backwards around the book, then gluing it in place.

Wrap the cover around the other 'pages' and glue in place

And that's all there is too it!   You can use this folding technique for all sorts of little projects.  The great part is you only need to print on one side of the page to create a little book and cover.

Finished 'books'.  I used a gold marker to cover any white showing on the covers

I also put together a couple of pages for my Cricut Cutter. 

Want to play with this design?  Here's the link

Here's a link for a full page of ornament-style tags. 

I try to fit as much onto each page as possible.  The chinese-lantern shaped ornaments should be free, whether or not you have a Cricut Access subscription.  The rest might cost something to cut if you don't already have a subscription.  (I renewed my subscription for the holidays, and will cancel in January, because it's really nice to be able to use the stock designs for faster holiday crafting.  I designed the page layouts for 8 1/2 x 11" cardstock (I used white index paper from Office Depot). 

Notice the text in the first file?  It's really fun watching the machine write.  In this case, I used Faber-Castell Pitt Fine Art pens in black and sepia.  They fit perfectly in the machine. 

Cricut 'drawing' Christmas designs on paper

Once I removed the cut designs from the mat, I decorated them with glitter paper, cut snowflakes, and twine.

Decorated ornament tags

And finally it was time to stuff the calendar boxes.  I start with any date-specific activities (picking out our Christmas tree, cookie decorating party, etc.) and then fill boxes from there.  Almost every box had at least two little things in it. 

Last night we opened the first box - it had the start of the Nativity story, and a question ornament "What is your favorite Holiday tradition?".  That started a fun conversation about Christmases past.

And I'll finish this post with two questions.   Do you do any crazy holiday crafting - what sort?  What's your favorite holiday tradition?

Happy Holidays!

Advent Calendars

As has happened so often of late, I'm way behind on my blogging.  My plan is to catch up this week with a blog post every day, just to see if I can do it.  Future posts will look at the additions to my Etsy store and the openning of a new, smaller store; I'll be announcing a give-away as a thank you to everyone who's helped support me this past year and this holiday season, and I'll be writing up a trip report on the Etsy Rain holiday show. 

But since today is December 1st, my thoughts are on Advent Calendars.   I love this time after Thanksgiving, leading up to Christmas and one of my favorite traditions for as long as I can remember have always been advent calendars.  A few years, I bought this fun, tree-shaped advent calendar from Starbucks.  It came with little chocolates in each of the drawers.


While it was cute enough, the next year I took it to my studio to give it a little make-over:

Each year, I keep an eye out for something new to put into the little drawers.  What has become a tradition is dividing Clement Clarke Moore's The Night Before Christmas into fourteen quatrains for inclusion in the drawers.   

This year through much roundaboutation, I came across Melissa's Etsy store, Loo de Loop.  She make gorgeous hand-sewn Advent calendars (I'm afraid it's too late to order those this year), but perfect for me, she also sells these fun activity pages for your calendar as a PDF download.  So I bought a set, but then I got to thinking that they didn't really match the color scheme of my current calendar.

I have Illustrator, I said to myself, wondering just how hard it could be to make my own pages.  A quick web search for Illustrator tutorials and found pay dirt:

*  A fantastic video tutorial by Alma Loveland on how to create decorative border frames.  (More free tutorials at nicolesclasses.comhttp://nicolesclasses.com).
*  A slightly less-clear, but still useful tutorial on how to make Snowflakes using Dynamic Shapes by Astute Graphics
*  Another Snowflake tutorial on Calobee Doodles that I haven't used yet, but looks much easier.  Their focus is design, the blog is beautiful and they have an Etsy site where they sell digital download Advent Calendars!  I love the circularity of all of this. 

My design based on the tutorials

At the right is my new design.  Like my pretty green borders?  I drew them myself with my pen tool.  I love all my little snowflakes - every single one is based off of a single six-pointed star.

Curious how they'd look in person, or would you like to download them for your own calendar?  The poem is long enough, that I've placed it in two files and uploaded both as PDFs to my dropbox.  Feel free to download them for your personal use:

     Page 1
     Page 2

It's kind of fun to watch them download, because the snowflakes appear first, a sprinkle at a time scattered about the page, with the frames coming last.  So it looks like it's snowing!

This morning I cut all the little slips of paper, both from my sheets and the ones I purchased from LoodeLoop, rolled them up, tied them with yarn and stuffed them into the appropriate drawers.

Since I don't have kids to open the drawers and it feels a little odd to open them myself, I make Joe open them and hover over his shoulder.  He's such a good sport!  Today he opened the first drawer, which contained the first quadrain of the poem and today's activity "Pick Out a Christmas Tree". 

His response?  "Ah, it's our to-do list!"

Premeire Issue of Creative Spark Online Magazine

free, online magazine by

Last month witnessed the launch of Creative Spark, a beautiful new online magazine (otherwise known as a glossi).  Designed and edited by Hope Smitherman and backed by Znet Shows, it features the works of thirteen designers and artists, including yours truly.

Talk about eye candy and inspiration!  The work and photography in here is gorgeous.  We were all challenged to respond to the theme "Rings and Bling" with a secondary inspiration of the changing of the season. It's fascinating to see the different interpretations.   And it's official - I'm in love with those cultured sea glass loops! 

The glossi is extremely image heavy, to the point that I had some trouble loading it on my iPad - but it was definitely worth hauling out the laptop.  So many wonderful ideas. 



Here are some sneak peaks into the interior:

lovely two page spread - these earrings make me think of summers spent at the lake

Bobbie Rafferty's Crystal Waves necklace is one of my favorites

One of my pieces, and my new artist photo (ack!)

The next issue of Creative Spark is scheduled for Winter 2013/2014 and will focus on Pearls. Oh la la!

Rest, Relaxation and Inspiration

DCL's Fantasy, docked at Castaway Cay

Slowly regaining my bearings after two wonderful weeks at sea on the Disney Cruise Lines Fantasy, sailing through the warm blue waters of the Caribbean.  This was our first time on Disney's new, larger ships and I have to say it was sweet.  I especially loved the new adults-only deck areas. 

Rather than giving you a potentially boring blow by blow of our vacation, I thought I'd take a slightly different approach and share some of the inspiration I found on board.  Unlike other cruise lines, the Disney ships are designed by Imagineers, the same people who design the theme parks and attractions.  In my opinion, it really shows. 

All four ships were designed as "modern classics"; the Fantasy's interior design draws heavily from Art Nouveau.  Everywhere I went, I was awed by their attention to detail and their ability to tell a story.  Time and again, I was reminded of the City and Guilds' Design course I took with Gail Harker years ago - where we looked at all the different ways we might interpret and use a single source of inspiration.    I thought I'd share two of my favorites.

Roses used as a design element in the Royal Court restaurant

First up, the Royal Court restaurant.  It's overarching theme is Disney princesses, with several stunning mosaics depicting the ballroom scenes from their movies.  Cinderella running down the stairs, the feast from Sleeping Beauty, the ball at the end of Beauty and the Beast; you get the picture.  All done in tiny glass tiles.  That's the art, and it is truly beautiful.

But what brought me back to the restaurant before breakfast one morning were all of the different ways they used Roses.  My collage shows a few of these, including the pillars that sweep into tree-like light-canopies overhead, and the carpets and tile underfoot.  Beauty's roses crest each pillar, which are topped in turn by rose bushes which also hide the main light fixtures for the room.   Most of the room is done in muted shades of ecru and cream, reminding me of castle walls, except for the flooring coverings.  Tile paths led through the restaurant, with rich red and gold carpets to either side.  I'm particularly fond of the bramble vines, though the densely packed rosebuds create a gorgeous red-carpet effect. 

It was really funny, because the waitstaff got a kick out of watching me run around taking pictures of carpeting and they started pointing things out, making sure I didn't miss any of the other details, including Cinderella's carriages embossed white-on-white on the plates, and the symbols for each of the princesses - rose, slipper, etc - carved into the backs of each chair. 

FYI, there are three main dining rooms - doing some quick math each can accommodate six hundred plus guests at any one seating.  But they never felt cavernous, or over-crowded. 

It's funny how you think you've taken so many photos, but you get home and discover that you're missing some of the most basic?  Well, I don't have any pictures of the whole, three-story atrium.  Just lots and lots of detail shots of all the different ways they used peacock feathers in the space.

The top right photo is of the atrium's central carpet.  It's every bit as detailed (and as large) as a full-scale wall mural.  If you look, you can see a few people in the picture for scale.  To me, it looks like a jewelry design waiting to happen.

Around the edges of the atrium, below the second floor balconies, the flooring switches to tile, reinterpreting the feather design yet again.  There's a set of broad stairs that sweeps up to the second floor of the atrium.  At the top of those stairs, three peacock feathers sweep out to fill the landing, with smaller blue-on-blue feathers in the background (bottom middle and left in my collage).  If you look closely, you'll note that even the railing carries the design.   The top two photos to the left of my collage are from the carpeting in the cafe area on the atrium's second floor.  The gold band helps delineates the walkway from the seating areas. 

I didn't do any beading on the trip, but I did do a little sketching. 

sketching while lounging on a deck chair around the Satellite Falls pool

Joe grabbed a shot of me painting my sketch in the atrium's cafe

And since it was a vacation, here a a couple of random shots:

One mural from the Royal Court restaurant.   I love all the details!

St Maarteen was one of our prettiest ports of call

An amazing sunrise over the water

my attempt to take a panoramic, just a little earlier the same sunrise

They say it's 7 years good luck to kiss a stingray

It wouldn't be a Disney Cruise without the characters

Capt. Jack Sparrow staggered, wandered down the beach at Disney's private island, so of course I had to grab a shot with him.  Not my best shot - but Captain Jack's looking good.  :)  Joe spent part of each morning journaling at the bar up on the pool deck.  We got to check out the kids' clubs during one of their open houses.  Boy does it look like it would be fun to be a kid!  And Joe heading back to the ship after we toured Costa Maya, Mexico. 

And now we're home.  Can I just say that Seattle seems positively cold in comparison?   It seems that we've jumped straight from Summer into Autumn.  I'm teaching my Fancy Fish at Fusion Beads this coming Sunday.  Last I checked, there's still a couple of spots if you're in town and interested.  Also need to finish up a little something for Sarah's Sequintastic September this Saturday.  Oh, and I've decided to rearrange my studio - I spent the morning moving furniture and tubs of fabric.

Hi ho, hi ho..... Just wish I could whistle as well as they do. 

Value, Texture and Line - Monochromatic Compositions

This week's Focus on Life prompt is Monochrome.  Color is the single most personally important element in my art work.  Color is what drew me to seed beads in the first place - those pure pixels of color in the form of tiny glass beads.

When you take away color, you're left with value, texture and line.  I found myself looking for these elements every where I went this past week.  

In particular, I found myself noticing all the public art work which ignores color completely, focusing on the other design elements.  My favorite I've decided it this window screen on one of the parking garages downtown.  I love the overlapping, concentric circles, like ripples in a pond.

Complimentary Colors and Opposites Attract

Can't believe it's been a week since my last blog post!  It's been rolling deadlines for the past month and looks likely to continue through Bead Fest at the end of this month.  But I did get the class proposals in last week, and just submitted my book project for review - should hear back on that by tomorrrow, keeping my fingers crossed.  In the meantime, I've promised to write a post on complimentary colors.

Fall is my favorite season.  I love this time of year, as Summer and Winter fight it out for supremacy. The days are still sunny and warm here in Seattle, but the nights are cool and chill.  We're still using our summer sheets, not quite ready for flannel yet, but I had to find an extra blanket for the bed.  And I love the colors.  One of the trees outside our house has turned a bright scarlet while the other is still mostly green - a perfect complimentary color combination.


Everywhere I look the trees are layered with red, orange and green leaves.  And since we're at the end of the dry season, there's golden brown grasses and bright blue skies.  It's funny that once the rain begins the grass will green back up and stay green through the winter, but our 'sunnier' days will tend to have bright white skies instead of blue.  So I'm definitely enjoying the blue while we have it.  To top it off, the sunrises lately have been magnificent; in shades of violet and purple and gold.

I seem to particularly like blue/orange color combos for earrings

Like Summer and Winter, complimentary color combos draw both warm and cool temperatures into play.  You're pulling not only from opposite sides of the color wheel, but also from opposing color temperatures. 

Take the Blue/Orange compliments: here you're combining orange, the hottest color on the color wheel, with blue the coolest.  This makes for a particularly dynamic color scheme, but also poses its own sets of problems as the two vie for dominance. 

reds and greens in my Autumn Rain freeform peyote bracelet

I created my Autumn Rain freeform peyote bracelet nearly five years ago now, attempting to capture the particular colors of the season.

It's funny in that I usually think of it as "red", but in truth, it has a strong green component.  The green is simply more muted and darker, taking on the role of branches and shadows while the reds do their best to steal the show. 



 I also love how the transparency of the beads, glowing just the way that fall leaves do when the sun hits them just right.  I've never been able to capture that as well in any other medium.

Looking at the combinations on a standard color wheel, I noted the following, which I thought I'd share:

Orange and Blue: some value contrast, strong color temperature differences

Purple and Yellow/Gold: strong value contrast, some color temperature differences

Red and Green: smallest value contrast of the complimentary combos, some color temperature contrast, too.

burnt orange & phthalo blue acrylics color mixing study

And if you mix two compliments together, you end up with really interesting neutrals - sometimes greys, sometimes blacks, sometimes browns.

It's funny, but I really don't seem to use the purple/yellow colorway in my beading.  Looking through my work, the closest I could find was a thread painting sample I made years ago.  It's free motion embroidery, which I haven't touched in ages but is very nearly as slow as bead weaving.

Think I may have to look at a project in purple and gold.  In November. 

For now I'll just keep trucking away.  And in the meantime, I'm slowly adding to my latest Pinterest Board on, you guessed it, Complimentary Colors. 

Analogous Colors - Kissing Cousins or Noisy Neighbors?

For this seventh installment of my weekly design series, I'm continuing along with the color wheel, this time looking at Analogous Colors. 

Analogous Colors are next door neighbors on the color wheel.  They go together quite naturally due totheir close proximity.  In fact, sometimes it can be hard to decide where one color leaves off and the next begins. 

Take the paint color Cadmium Yellow Medium for example.  Is it really, truly yellow, or is it orange?  My eye tends to say it's the later, especially when compared to the bright, sunny shade of Lemon Yellow. 

A quick peak at the two color charts to the right and you'll see what I mean.  That's where the 12-step color wheel comes in handy.  In my world, I label Cad Yellow Med yellow-orange and count it good.

But from paint mixing terms, you can see that it is a yellow, because when mixed with blues I get a series of green intermediaries, not browns or neutrals (this is something I'll revisit again next week when I talk about complimentary colors). 

Cad Yellow Medium and Lemon Yellow are also great examples of warm and cool hues of the same color.  I'll let you guess which is which. 




Here are a couple of other Analogous Color Combos from my painted color studies. 

Cadmium Yellow Med again, this time paired with Napthol Crimson, which is a fun red with a bit of blue undertones. 

The vertical swatch of red in the top right hand color is an unmixed example of the crimson.  Mix it with just the teensiest bit of cad yellow and you get the bold red of the horizontal stripe.

So warm and yummy!  You could totally turn this into a fall color scheme.

The purples in this mix are quite warm, indicating that both the red and blue had distinct red undertones.  

This color combo is very dramatic, and makes me think of Flamenco.   Probably because the purply reds make me think of shadows in the ruffles and flounces of a flamenco dress. 

Here's my Spanish Dancer freeform peyote bracelet again.  I debated adding it to this post, but I just couldn't write a post about analogous colors and not include it.

It's has an extended range, encompassing half the color wheel from yellow-orange all the way through to violet, but it's definitely an analogous color combo in the ways that the colors flow from one to the other. 

And here's one of my little Fancy Fish.  I made this one for my husband, so I was going for more masculine colors, so I stuck with the blue/purple sides of the color wheel. 

It's almost the same colors as a Japanese fighting fish (except its fins were a deep purple-black) I had in college and I figured, what could be more masculine than a fighting fish? 













So now it's your turn?  What are some of your favorite analogous color combinations?  I'd love to see them.

Me, Myself and I - Monochromatic Color Combinations

Continuing in my design series, today I'm thinking about monochromatic color combinations.  Designing around a single color.  The single color works as a strong Unifying element, but since we're only using one color, Contrast has to come from somewhere else. 

Ocean Currents, freeform peyote bracelet - blue, blue and more blue

Truth is, I don't work with monochromatic designs every often.   When I do, I tend to make liberal use of Value such as my in  Ocean Currents series. 

Here, I shade from bright white to deep blues. 

I'm also using Undertones to provide additional contrast - with both warm and cool blues. But I've stuck with relatively pure, intense versions of each hue. 





In my Leopard Jasper choker, I shade from a light cream, through dark chocolate, ending on the other end of the value scale at black.

Brown is more often considered a neutral, rather than a 'color' in and of its own right.  That said, there's no reason why you can't use it as the focus of a monochromatic composition. 

You just have to find interesting enough browns.  I combined warm, rich browns with more neutral antique bronze beads (which worked well with the antique bronze button). 

Lariat by Malin de Konig

Adding Neutrals for Contrast

Malin de Konig graciously allowed me to use the picture at left of her lariat.  

In this clean, elegant design, Malin combines a single shade of red with a warm, rich neutral brown and antique brass. I love how it allows the red to sing and take center stage. 

Check out Malin's blog post to see additional pictures.

Additional Resources

Looking for other samples of monochromatic compositions, I put together a Pinterest board, aptly named Monochromatic Jewelry Designs, using a number of the pieces from Sally Russick's One Crayon Color challenge from earlier this year. 

The Color Wheel - One Big, Happy Family

Everyone's seen at least one Color Wheel in their time, likely you've seen a half dozen or so.  Most have a lovely rainbow of colors like the one above.  We have:

• The primary colors: red, yellow, blue.  
• The secondary colors: orange, green and purple/violet.  
• Then there are the tertiary colors, sandwiched between the primaries and secondaries: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, red-violet. 

You know the drill.

However, the Color Wheel itself isn't the purpose of the exercise.  Rather, it's simply a tool to help us better understand the Relationships between the various colors on the wheel.  Because all the colors  on a particular wheel are defined by their relationships, you could say that they are one great big color family, bound by a number of familial traits.

A particular color wheel, familial traits, you ask?  Yep!

The colors are linked by the traits we looked at in earlier posts  - Undertones, Value, Intensity and Color Temperature. 

This means that you can play with varying these traits uniformally around the color wheel to study and develop alternate Color Families.  The key is to change them uniformly while obeying a few simple rules, so that the color relationships always remain the same.

For instance, yellow is always the lightest color and violet the darkest in terms of value on any given color wheel.  So if you decide to create a color wheel of pastels, you'd need to keep this in mind.  If violet somehow ended up lighter than the yellow, it simply wouldn't look right for that color wheel.

Three Rules (or Strong Suggestions) for Color Wheels:

1) Value: As noted above, purple is always darkest (has the lowest value), while yellow is always lightest.  Also, the red and green should have approximately the same relative values.

2) Color Temperature: Orange is always the hottest color in any particular color wheel.  Blue is always the coolest.  Again, if you create a color wheel that breaks this rule, it simply won't look right.

3) Intensity: All of the colors in the wheel should have approximately the same relative intensity.

In the traditional color wheel pictured at the start of this post, all of the colors are fully intense versions of their base colors.

my stab at an Earthtoned Color Wheel

But you could easily create alternate color wheels.  For instance:

If you wanted to make a color wheel of Earth Tones, you'd likely want to look at less intense, warmer versions of each of the colors.  You might or might not mess with the values.

In the color wheel of pastels I mentioned earlier, you would lighten (raise) the value of each of color, while making sure the value relationships between the different colors remain constant. Because, of course, constancy is essential to any good relationship!

You could even make a color wheel of neon colors, were you so inclined.  So long as you work within the basic relationship rules, you're good to go to build a spiffy new, custom-made color wheel.  


And since I'd love to see more participation with this series, I'll issue a challenge.  If you put together your own unique color wheel in any medium (beads, paint, paint chips, yarn, etc), name it, photograph it and either email it to me or post it on my Facebook page by September 11th (my anniversary) I'll enter you in a drawing to win the beaded bead pendant from my most recent Bead Soup.  I'd love to hear from you!