Noel

Here's how I spent the day in my Studio.

My intention was to do a quick craft, based on the "FALL" frames I made earlier this year. I wanted to make the same project using the word NOEL.

This "quick craft" took far longer than I anticipated because my first attempts didn't work. I'd planned to have deep forest green letters on a glittery gold background with gold frames. My green paint wasn't right. It had too much gray in it.

Next I tried for cranberry red letters on a glittery green background with gold frames. The red was too brick, so I added bright red to it and *almost* got a cranberry color. But it wasn't great. So I tried adding some glitter on top of the red. I figured if the letters sparkled enough, the strange red underneath wouldn't be so obvious. Now, I *thought* I had iridescent fine glitter, but it turned out to be white not-so-fine glitter. It looked horrible.

About that time, Dale came to check on me and discovered how discouraged I was. He reminded me that this is par for the course in the life of an artist. You try things. Some things work; some things don't. He recommended I go to the store and get some new letters and new paint.

I decided to try one more thing before going that route. I scraped the glitter off as well as I could. Then I looked in my paint drawer to see what else I had on hand that might work. I found some metallic paint which I thought was a white. It looked white on the label, it looked white while painting it on the letters. But as it dried, it was silver! Hooray! Lucky break!

While the first layer of paint dried, I dug through my stash to see what I might use for a background. Nothing good. I wracked my brain, and came up with an idea. Into storage I went to dig out the Christmas wrapping paper. Voila! I found a red foil with silver snowflakes. Excellent.

It took several coats of paint to cover up the red. So while the next coat of paint dried, I popped over to the Dollar Tree to get some silver frames. The silver works better with my Christmas tree decor this year, anyway!

When I got home, I was finally ready to assemble the frames ... only to find out that the "N" was too wide.   ::hrumpf::   So I found a saw and cut off most of one of the serifs so that the "N" would fit in the frame. But first I had to do some touch-up painting on the sawed-off end.

Finally, finally, I was able to assemble the frames. The wrapping paper was cut to size and taped to the back of the glass. The frame was reassembled. The letters were hot glued to the front of the glass. The glue tails were cleaned up.

Our living room mantle now proclaims "LEON" ... well, it did until I put the letters in the correct order.

Joyeux Noel!