Porcelain Doll
In the eighties, when I was in high school, my mom took a doll-making class and made three porcelain dolls, one for me and one for each of my sisters. During this time she was working as a night nurse at the hospital, putting in …
Author: Leslie Kimel
Easter Ornaments
I’ve made a few new ornaments for my Easter tree! I like to spend the dark winter evenings making funny, ridiculously cute Easter ornaments and dreaming about spring. I’ve only recently started crafting again after a 30-year hiatus. I grew up crafting because my mother …
Christmastime at Mom’s
I know it’s after Christmas now, but I just have to pay tribute to my mom’s Christmas spirit. Even at 81 years old, she can still create Christmas magic like nobody else.
At Christmastime (and, really, all the time) there’s a wonderful feeling at Mom’s house of creative bounty. The cozy house seems like Santa’s workshop, like a magical factory churning out treats, toys, ornaments, and other seasonal delights. This year, for much of December, the dining room table was covered with Christmas gifts that Mom was making for my sister Bunny’s second-grade students. Mountains of homemade candy and cookies and cute little prizes (sparkly pencils, cupcake-shaped erasers, etc. ) surrounded a centerpiece of luscious peppermint-striped amaryllis. Mom had even made each child their own red velvet stocking with their name spelled out in silver glitter.
Every year Mom’s living room is bursting with Christmas. The room will be crowded with presents (so many that you can barely squeeze in the door!), and there are always several Christmas trees and a Christmas village. Christmas candles glow and flicker, and every chair is taken up by a jolly extended family of puffy snowman dolls, the gents wearing vests and the ladies wearing shawls.
“There’s so much to see in here,” I always say when I stand in her living room. “It’s just awesome. There are so many details.”
Rob calls it “a Christmas explosion.”
Mom’s main Christmas tree is always loaded with candy-colored lights, gold garland, and the funniest, cutest, prettiest ornaments, most of them handmade. Lace angels hover here and there, and a little felt mouse sleeps in a walnut-shell cradle.
Big glittery silk flowers bloom all over the tree, from top to bottom–poinsettias, lilies, roses, sunflowers, and more.
“I like to use the flowers to fill in the holes,” Mom will chuckle.
Our presents are all wrapped in Mom’s special way. Mom is the world’s best present-wrapper! The wrapping is sparkly and lush, over the top, with lavish bows–and little extra presents attached to the bows for even more bling. (Mom calls the little extra presents “toppers.”)
Mom’s Christmas decorating is so exuberant, so super-duper, that it makes my own decorating seem, by contrast, cautious, even stingy. Mom’s decorating is a perfect reflection of her heart. There’s so much joy and love apparent in it, such generosity and freedom, lack of concern for rules, such buoyancy, such a sense of fun. Mom has Easter chicks and bunnies mixed in with the Christmas stuff. One bunny even holds a tray with a Christmas-tree-shaped candle on it. Mom doesn’t care. She never excludes. She welcomes everybody to participate in her Christmas celebration, even the Easter Bunny.
Mom doesn’t put lights outside, but her yard always seems decorated for Christmas because it’s so full of flowers and fruits. Oh, the bounty! You should see it. Every nook and cranny is festooned with blossoms and fallen petals, and lemons, grapefruit, and satsumas hang from the citrus trees like shining Christmas balls.
If you ever visit Mom’s house, you will go home with a present–not just at Christmastime but any time, even in July, even in January. A few weeks ago, I went over there on a random Sunday and she said, “Since you have so many fireplaces, I was wondering if you might like some more Christmas stockings!”
(For years Mom has been making special embellished stockings covered with sequins and beads and fancy stitching, each one an elaborate project that takes weeks to finish.)
“Sure,” I said. “If you’re sure you don’t want them.”
“I don’t,” Mom insisted. “They’re just sittin’ here!”
Then she led me into her bedroom and opened a storage bin filled to the brim with fancy sequined, beaded stockings—big stacks of them. I mean, there had to be 50 or more. I chose eight more stockings, promising to take very good care of them.
“I can’t believe you made all of these!” I said.
“Well,” Mom laughed, “I have to have something to do while I’m watching Perry Mason in the morning!”
Ballerina Bear
This morning I finished up another felt Christmas ornament–a ballerina bear! I’m afraid I hit a snag when I was working on her tutu, because it turned out looking more like a cape than a skirt. Oh, well. She’s still super cute. A book I …
Christmas Queen
This weekend, I made another felt Christmas ornament—a Christmas queen! Before I got started this time, I did a little research in preparation—I read up on the basics of embroidery. I tried hard to be neat, but, despite my best efforts, things went awry and …
Snow Kitten
On Friday night, I started making a new Christmas ornament–a snow kitten! I had so much fun.
Rob was playing a show with his band, so the cats and I were on our own. As soon as I got home from work, I changed into my pajamas and pulled out all my felt, embroidery thread, lace, beads, silk flowers, sequins, jingle bells, and other crafting supplies. I brewed some hot tea (Raspberry Zinger) and sat down to work at the dining room table with Buntin in my lap. (She growled softly every time I even thought about getting up.)
As I cut and stitched, I was half-watching (well, mostly just listening to) Love at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, the best Hallmark Channel movie ever. (If you haven’t seen it, you must!) Meanwhile, June, a real busybody, was digging in my various boxes of buttons and beads and “accidentally” knocking important things off the table. I was glad when she finally settled down on a mound of stuffing to supervise my work. Around midnight, I finished the snow kitten’s elaborate head and went to sleep dreaming about all the jewelry and other finery I wanted to make for her the next morning.
Before Rob even woke up on Saturday, the whole kitten was done and I took her outside to pose for pictures with my roses. I think she’s so cute though a tad poorly sewn. My resolution for the new year is to take sewing lessons!
October Magic
When I was a child, October was my favorite month. I loved Halloween and the special crispness and sparkle of the early-fall days. All month I’d live in a state of high excitement and dread going to sleep for fear I’d miss something–a visit from …
Painting
About a year and a half ago, I started painting with acrylics. This is something I’m really proud of—not because I’m very good at painting but just because I have found the courage again, after a long time, to try to paint.
Drawing was my first love as a human being. As a child, I used to draw all the time—and I remember that I had very strong feelings about drawing even at a young age, at six, maybe even at four. There was so much ugliness and fear in my life, in our house, and I remember thinking that drawing was the only path to beauty that was open to me. I didn’t have a pretty face, I’d been told, or pretty clothes, and drawing was my only hope, I thought, the only way that I could reach the Land of Beauty, a tantalizing, far-off place surrounded by moats and fog.
I remember being so frustrated by drawing. I wanted to get better at it, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t have the type of parents who would sign me up for art lessons or buy me art supplies or encourage me, say, “Don’t give up! Just keep trying!” No. So I would tear up my drawings. I would cry. I remember sitting in my closet and crying, when I was nine or ten, because my hands were so clumsy, because I couldn’t draw what I glimpsed in my mind—the distant towers and turrets in the Land of Beauty.
And then when I was in ninth grade, I took a 3-D art class at school. I was extremely, ridiculously shy and afraid to assert myself, to take my turn with the various tools that we students were supposed to share. I sat at my desk and tried to make something without any tools, and the result was terrible—babyish and messy, the worst in the whole class.
I had to endure a critique. Everybody was supposed to chime in. The teacher said my piece was sloppy, and the kids said similar things. And of course they were right. It was sloppy! Their criticism was justified and not meant to hurt me, but I let it hurt me. I took it so hard, felt it so deeply. My whole concept of myself changed, changed completely; I decided that I wasn’t creative or artistic, and I never signed up for another art class in high school.
I still drew at home, in private, but drawing was no longer really part of my notion of myself. I thought I was terrible at it. I thought I had no right to do it.
And after a while I became afraid to draw, afraid to try because I was sure I would fail. This went on for a very long time and caused me all kinds of sorrow. Not drawing was a huge, secret source of pain.
I didn’t draw for about 30 years! But then, in 2013, I bought some pastels and I tried to make a picture. I was terrified. I told myself the only rule was that I had to finish it—and I did. I did finish it. That year, I completed maybe four or five pictures. The next year, I finished a few more.
I wasn’t mean to myself about these pictures. I didn’t criticize them. I took joy in them. I was drawing! Every time I got out my pastels, I was scared. But I triumphed. I faced down my fear. I made a little picture—time and time again.
Then in 2018, I bought an inexpensive set of acrylic paints. I started painting. It was so much fun! I’d sit (and still do now) at the dining room table and listen to audio books and paint portraits of my teddy bears. I don’t judge my paintings. I don’t care if they’re bad. I simply enjoy making them, and every time I pick up my brush it’s a victory, a victory over my greatest enemy—myself.
