St. Lucia

So when we brought our big box of Christmas books up and unloaded them into the basket to be read throughout the season, I started looking through one entitled, "A Forest Christmas," by Mayling Mack Holm, which I had picked up at a library book sale because it had cute pictures.  And I saw this particular picture.

And it was so cute!  And it reminded me of the vague memories of other pictures of pretty Swedish girls with their crown of candles, which always seems so special.  And poked around on pinterest and found more pictures like that.

And I read up on the tradition, which happens on Dec. 13th, which is St. Lucia Day and celebrated in Sweden and sometimes surrounding countries.

(Even an Elsa St. Lucia)

And of course, I had to make my girls white nightgowns and crowns, and my boys white nightshirts and star hats.  (Please do me a favor and click on these pictures so you can view them large.)

(So, I had worked hard to get the outfits sewn, hats made, wands made, ribbon picked out, crowns assembled, everyone cajoled and bribed and packed up in the van, driven 30 minutes to this Christmas tree farm, the kids got out and of course had to pee, luckily we had good weather but the light was fading fast, realized I had forgotten the ribbons to go around the girls' waists, finally got them all situated and started taking pictures.  Had taken quite a few when I looked at the screen on my camera and realized THERE WAS NO MEMORY CARD!!!  Accckkckkgggghghhh!! (that was me choking and nearly dying of a heart attack).  By greatest mercy, I had another card in my camera bag and was able to start over--this time SAVING the pictures I was taking.  But, alas, Wyatt was already PAST done by that point.  So this was the final picture with Wyatt in it.  Also, if you look carefully at the third and fourth pictures of this post, you can see in both those illustrations one of the little boys is holding up his hat.  It's so awesome that they are drawn that way because it's so TRUE!  Those hats never wanted to stay straight up!!  They were also dangerous weapons---it would start to slip backwards and then the kid would turn around and it would wack someone else in the eyeballs.  Crazy)

Those boys!  My heart!

OH these girls make my heart go so SQUEEZY!!!

 

 

Gosh I love these beautiful kids!

Shark shooter.

So I did a freezer-paper stencil shirt for Talmage, and I was pretty impressed with it because, a) it turned out looking pretty good, and b) it was all my creation- idea and execution. 

So Talmage was playing with legos, and he had this shark-man holding a bow and arrow, and when I saw it I thought that it looked so cool and that it would make a pretty awesome shirt design.  So, I made it into one.

First I took a picture.

Then I turned it into this

and then this.

Then I looked online to see if there were any tutorials about doing freezer paper stenciling with more than one color—to  see if it’s possible—and  I found this one, so obviously it works just fine.  So, then I cut it out and painted it on.  I thought it was not too shabby!

The only problem was that since the shirt is such a dark color, the black of the arrow wasn’t standing out very well, so I waffled a bit but finally decided to outline it in white.

So now it looks like this.  Ha ha, Talmage looks so enthused!