On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Eleven ropes a swinging,
Ten birthdays and counting,
Nine, oh so cutesy,
Eight canes, not candy,
Seven snowman monsters,
Six scrap metal remnants,
Five… snow… man… rings,
Four carved from a nut,
Three disc men,
Two simple blocks,
and a snowman family straight from the sea.
I think I went a bit off the rails with these snowmen. Maybe a bit too much Martha Stewart, not enough Corbusier.
On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Ten birthdays and counting,
Nine, oh so cutesy,
Eight canes, not candy,
Seven snowman monsters,
Six scrap metal remnants,
Five… snow… man… rings,
Four carved from a nut,
Three disc men,
Two simple blocks,
and a snowman family straight from the sea.
Here’s a simple snowman ornament to commemorate the ten years Robyn, Beck and I have been a family. Technically, if you include the nine months Robyn spent carrying Beck around before he was born and the couple of months since his 10th birthday, it’s been eleven years. But why quibble.
On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Nine, oh so cutesy,
Eight canes, not candy,
Seven snowman monsters,
Six scrap metal remnants,
Five… snow… man… rings,
Four carved from a nut,
Three disc men,
Two simple blocks,
and a snowman family straight from the sea.
If you are just tuning in to this blog, here’s a quick recap. Every year at Christmas I create a snowman ornament for my wife, Robyn. Read about it here. This year morphed into the Twelve Days of Christmas. We are on day nine.
Cute is the word of the day. Some of these snowmen began their lives as sketches, others sort of evolved in my hands (you can do that easier in clay than wood).
Below is… the Snowman Executioner. Dum dum da dummm… Sometimes designs evolve in an unintentional direction. I didn’t set out to create an executioner (springtime usually takes care of the snowman overpopulation problem on its own) and, as you can see, it didn’t look that way on the concept sketch. Oh well, another snowman gone bad.
… and finally, a couple of malnourished snowmen. Remember to feed your snowmen, kids!
On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Eight canes, not candy,
Seven snowman monsters,
Six scrap metal remnants,
Five… snow… man… rings,
Four carved from a nut,
Three disc men,
Two simple blocks,
and a snowman family straight from the sea.
I designed these little snowmen to look like icicles hanging on a Christmas tree. Honestly, they don’t look much like snowmen or icicles. Cigarettes, maybe? Uhhh… just say no, kids!
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Seven snowman monsters,
Six scrap metal remnants,
Five… snow… man… rings,
Four carved from a nut,
Three disc men,
Two simple blocks,
and a snowman family straight from the sea.
Nothing says Christmas like snowman monsters! Some of these are bipolar (from the North Bi-pole, of course).
On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Six scrap metal remnants,
Five… snow… man… rings,
Four carved from a nut,
Three disc men,
Two simple blocks,
and a snowman family straight from the sea.
If you have ever dallied among the tents of a craft show, you have undoubtedly seen cute, little animals crafted from junkyard scraps. I always admire the contrast created by hard mechanical objects depicting soft organic. So, I took a trip to my local hardware store. This is the result.
…and here are a few of my metal snowmen from year’s past.
On the fifth (and 1/2) day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Five… more… snow… man… rings,
Four carved from a nut,
Three disc men,
Two simple blocks,
and a snowman family straight from the sea.
We’re talking tectonic minimalism here. The question of the day is, “what is the bare essence of a snowman?” Do we need eyes, buttons, scarf, pipe, etc. to capture that essence?
The answer: Something round and sporting a top hat appears to be the bare minimum that most people perceive as a snowman. Adding a carrot puts it on firmly on solid ground.
The next question: how many ways can you place the carrot and what does that do to the design?
Finally, does adding color reinforce the design or detract from it?
It’s obviously subjective, but I lean toward the purity of the unfinished, sculptural snowmen shown below.
Something fun to ponder: Notice the visual difference between the two snowmen below. It is entirely due to the position of the carrots. With the carrot positioned at the top, the wood ring appears as a body, while at the bottom it appears as a head. It is so cool that such a minor alteration causes such a major impact!
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Five… snow… man… rings,
Four carved from a nut,
Three disc men,
Two simple blocks,
and a snowman family straight from the sea.
On the fifth day of Christmas, you must have rings. Lords a leaping are expendable, and maids a milking? Seriously? let’s face it, nobody wants the turtledoves, either, but rings are essential.
So, today is about rings.
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Four carved from a nut,
Three disc men,
Two simple blocks,
and a snowman family straight from the sea.
What do you get when you clamp a nut from an Australian Bull Banksia tree onto a wood lathe? Nothing – until you turn it on and jam your chisel into the spinning nut. Then all hell breaks loose.
The nut has a hard, lumpy skin and a wood center, but between these is a layer of fluffy seed-like material that breaks apart on contact, flying through the air in a torrential blizzard of skin chips and fuzz. I’m hoping to torch my workshop before I have to clean it.
Good times.
All four of these ornaments were made from a single nut. The three larger ornaments are designed as table decorations, while the smaller one above hangs on the tree.
On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Three disc men,
Two simple blocks,
and a snowman family straight from the sea.
I thought it would be a piece of cake to whip out a few clay discs and turn them into snowmen. Not so. Simple idea, painful execution. This is a lesson you learn early as an architect – what is easy to draw is not always easy to build (we learn it, we just don’t always follow it).
What I didn’t know was that the glazing you paint on clay turns into liquid glass when baked in the kiln. If the glaze touches the kiln, well, get out your chisel because it isn’t coming off in one piece.
And guess what? Clay shrinks as it dries. the holes you think are big enough for the wire to thread the discs together, aren’t.
What’s more, if you aren’t careful (i.e. impatient and sloppy), the glaze fills up those holes. It cannot be drilled out. Believe me, I tried.
Did I mention how brittle thin discs of clay are after they dry? Not so brittle that they can’t be tossed into a Ziplock and crammed into a backpack for the trip to the kiln. Nope. Not that brittle.
But, as I say to Beck, quitters never win, and winners never quit. And, the true craftsman never blames his tools. And, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.
Oh, and my all time favorite, if you don’t fail, you aren’t trying hard enough. I tell Beck a lot of stuff.
