Teleidoscope

Sun, Dec 09, 2007

Pinecone Wreath

Posted at 7:15 pm MST to Miscellaneous

My Mom did a lot of arts and crafts stuff. She made a lot of the clothes we both wore, filled the house with hand-braided rugs and did all sorts of other projects. Slipcovers. Lampshades. Painting on glass: I still have a mirror she made for me in a frame with a painting on glass of a castle in an upper panel.

One of the crafts she worked on was pinecone wreaths. I think she might have learned to make them from her Aunt Blanche, like the braided rugs, but I'm not sure.

We had a 30 or 36-inch round mirror in the living room, and one of the wreaths always went on the mirror. She had given it a colored backing, so the mirror did not relfect the framework and wires.

There was another pinecone wreath that often went on the front door. I remember her gathering green things in the woods (that were actually a kind of moss or fern) that were added to wreaths and garlands, too.

The year my brother Larry and I got our first apartments, Mom made us each a pinecone wreath.
I still have mine:

She used to give each of us kids a Christmas ornament every year, so we would have ornaments with histories for our own trees when we went out on our own, not just boxes of commercial ornaments. I don't have all of those -- some have broken over the years. But I've kept up the tradition of giving ornaments each year to my brothers and their kids (I get one for myself at the same time).

Here's a picture of my village, too. It's on the top shelf of the stereo stack next to the TV, where I can see it all the time. I need to tweak the layout some more. The package of trees included a piece of 'road' that was rolled up and doesn't want to lay flat yet.

The layout is deeper and less two-dimensional than it looks in the picture, too. I need to work on that. Something under the snow blanket to add some slopes might help.

The buildings light up at night. But it really needs some street lamps or something to illuminate the little groupings of people.

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