Merry Christmas to All.

HAPPY, Merry Christmas indeed. The day has dawned brighter - both literally and inside my "attic." I've been dusting away a few "mind cobwebs" and using art to help the process along.
Here is our Oregon sun, finally come calling around 2 p.m. Everything is dripping as the ice and snow melts in the trees and on the roofs.
I took a picture of one of our birdbath snowcones. This is a ceramic birdbath my mother made for me. It really should not have spent the winter outside, but ... guess what?
Today I worked on housecleaning, which in its own mindless way is a good sort of meditation. Scrubbing the tub gives you time to think and you can certainly use it as aerobic exercise if you've waited as long as I have to clean the tub.
Company is coming on Sunday so I'd really like to have a clean bathroom. Sometimes people check out the tub, did you know that?
In between I made a batch of cornbread for the meal on Sunday. We are having an open house and, of course, I will prepare enough food for a small army. (Here I am in artistic "watercolor" mode, thanks to Photoshop, posing by the sink and clean dishes.)
There was laundry and folding clothes and getting wood and building a fire in the fireplace. We had steak on the barbecue for dinner with a green salad and brussel sprouts. Need some greens this time of year! (Looked nice and I almost took a picture, but I stopped myself. Enough with the pictures. Let's just eat it - not shoot it.)
Then it was time to paint paper. It's plain white drawing paper, and I painted it on both sides with white gesso. (I want to try clear gesso. Someone in my SoulJournal group mentioned it. You can order it from Dick Blick. I really want to see if it coats journal pages and images better than the other things I have tried. I am not happy with matte gel.)
Anyway, with the gesso I mixed in acrylic paint - sprinkled water on some of it, and on other pieces painted on more gesso and then wiped with a wet paper towel. After the paper had dried, I stamped it with a homemade blue foam block stamp I embossed with old keys. Then I stamped a bird print in a few places. (I carved that stamp, inspired by one done by Mel Stampz - love that lady's work.)
Then I decided to emboss them with gold glitter and a heat gun. And then I used a "tag" cutter that my pal Sylvia loaned me and some yarn. Now I have quite a few tags, which will come in handy on Sunday when I give gifts to family members we didn't get to see on Christmas.
Or I can use them for some other purpose. Do you see the paper I used to cut out the tags? Now there are openings - arches - that might be perfect to glue in front of other pictures. Stuff from magazines that need to be spotlighted in their own little arch or shrine. Best get to bed. Another big, exciting day tomorrow - femminismo