Ever since the Country Living announcement, I’ve been madly trying to finish up some of prints needed to complete several of the series of cards I’ve been working on. I was up until the wee hours of the morning Monday night printing cards of my linoleum prints.

I was so excited to print this farm card — the final in the series (for now). I love how it came out.

And I love my new cow, which completes The Farm series (for now).




Some I’d finished a few weeks ago, like the Wyoming Wildlife Series.There’s more I want to add to this series, but I won’t consider a series ‘complete’ until there are at least 4 prints to it, so this is complete for now.


Then there’s the ‘Hen Series’. That’s ‘complete’ for now too.


And I’ve finally got the “Cowboy/Cowgirl/Western series” complete for now as well. I’m working on a cutting card, but it’s really complicated so I can only work on it a little at a time. I also need to add a team penning card (since that’s my event). All in good time.


I’ve got to do one more before I can call the ‘Rooster Series’ complete. That’s going to be a good one!

It’s my goal to get all of these finished series up on my Etsy shop by the end of the weekend. I hope.

They look pretty how I packaged them.


I got an idea for a project the other day. So I made this linoleum print:

And I printed it on burlap. I wasn’t sure how it was going to come out, but it came out great.


And then I printed a couple of roosters on burlap.



I’m going to keep you in suspense though as to what I’m making with this printed burlap…

I saw this lovely Fall/Thanksgiving wreath on Pinterest a week or so ago made of indian corn. It was a link from Parents.com and it looked pretty easy. Amanda is coming home for Thanksgiving and I’m cooking as usual. Since she’s now 21 and a senior in college I take every holiday as possibly the last…Thanksgiving…Christmas…that we’ll spend together as a family, so of course I want to make everything nice.

Now that I’ve made this wreath it I can tell you a few things:  The person that made this wreath either

• a) lived on an indian corn farm so she had her pick of the most beautiful, universally-sized tiny indian corn on the face of the planet.

or

• b) After I’d made it I was beginning to think it might have been a Martha Stewart wreath because it was so perfectly perfect. I guess the people at Parents.com are as demanding as Martha is.

 

The indian corn I found I thought was pretty nice looking, but they were sold in bunches of 3, and the bunches were held together by a tight rubber band, which, as the corn dried, it dried the stalks in a kind of mashed-up way. I even tried steaming the stalks over boiling water to soften them up and unfold the rubber-band kinks without any luck. And the stalks I had certainly weren’t that beautiful uniform light straw color – mine were darker, and some were discolored even more than others.

Also, unless I wanted to spend a fortune on maybe 100 ears of corn to be able to pick the perfect 25 to put on the wreath, there was just no way to get it to look the way it did in that original photo. And unless you were using really tiny indian corn, there was simply no way to but them right next to each other the way they are on the original wreath either. With the lengths I had, and they were pretty small I thought, you had to leave some space between them or you couldn’t have kept the wreath’s circle shape.

However, I still like the wreath the way it is. It’s much more “me” than that perfect one would have been. Even Jim, who doesn’t dole out compliments freely, said he much preferred mine to the look of this one. And it was pretty simple to make. I bought a foam wreath, foam glue (but I think you could just use hot glue if you wanted), some ribbon to cover the wreath with, (you’ll need 2 9-foot rolls), miniature indian corn, some wire to place a hanger on the back when it’s finished, and a hot glue gun and glue sticks.

Place a line or two of glue on the bottom of the wreath. I did a few inches at a time. I pinned the ribbon in place at the beginning of the roll so I could get a nice, tight roll. Then I just wrapped the ribbon around the wreath tightly, trying not to waste the ribbon by getting as much coverage per turn as possible, gluing as I went along. At the start of the new roll I just pinned the end of the old roll into the wreath with the same pins I used to hold the beginning of the new roll, and kept gluing and rolling until it was all covered.


Then I just started hot gluing the corn to the wreath. I decided to keep the outside edges of the corn at about the same height, which meant that some were longer than others inside the wreath’s center. See above for why if you didn’t already read that. Space corns as closely as you can while still maintaining the shape of the wreath’s circle.


When it was done I figured out where would make the best top/center of the wreath, and on the back poked two holes into the ribbon so I could glue a hanging wire into the wreath. I had some covered wire that I doubled and bent into a ‘U’ shape. I hot glued this into the holes.


That’s it. You’re done. Pretty easy, even if it doesn’t look as perfect as that one on Parents.com. It’s always so much more satisfying to have made something than to have bought it. It is for me at least. And I think it looks pretty on my front door with my cornstalks and all of the funky pumpkins we bought this year.