wrapping up 2024

We got our first real snow on December 4th. We were only supposed to get an inch or two, but when I woke up and looked out my window it was a winter wonderland! There’s such a specific feeling to going to sleep with no snow and waking up to this beauty, and it cannot be explained. The fact that I have a friend who lives in New Zealand and has never seen snow in his life still boggles my mind.

Of course it was very heavy, wet snow which resulted in us losing power for a few hours, so I went outside and built a little snowman while we were left in the dark. He had a face on both sides: one for us and one for everyone driving by. The faces didn’t end up lasting long (the eyes very quickly started to melt out), but the snowman [incredibly] lasted for days. He defied all logic — and gravity — by bending completely over, while never losing his head. By the time he melted, his head was almost touching the ground, while still remaining firmly attached to his body.

I truly magical snowman.

when you wake up in the night to a snowplow going by your house, you know that you’re going to wake up to something beautiful in the morning

mary todd

Mary Todd is my very last chicken (Lizzie died at 10.5 years old a couple months ago), and if she makes it to April 29th, 2025 she’ll be 12 years old.

I bring her in on the nights that drop into the single digits, not because I don’t think she can handle it (she’s doing incredibly well and seems to be in perfect health), but because it just makes my heart hurt to think of her sleeping out there alone in those horrendous temps.

She loves spending the nights inside though, and stays quiet in her little pen for most of the day if I let her. I think she likes hearing all of our voices and being a bigger part of the family.

She’s also discovered that walnuts are her new favorite food.

Marry Todd (left) and Lizzie (right)

christmas eve

We decided to celebrate our Christmas with just the five of us on Christmas Eve this year; we opened our gifts, had a big meal, watched a Christmas movie, and just had a super chill day.

We’ve done our gifts all different ways in the past; when we were little we always opened them in the morning, but in more recent years we opened them in the evening, or we’ve even exchanging them randomly throughout the day before.

we like to reuse the brown packing paper that we get in packages as wrapping paper. It’s free, 100% recyclable, and honestly I think it’s super cute and classic. Where do you think “brown paper packages tied up with strings“ came from??

This year we were going to split up times of the day for each person to hand their gifts out (to make the fun last longer), but then we got up on Christmas Eve and it started snowing — not just a flurry, actually snow! — so we decided to take advantage of that magic and exchange gifts while we watched the world turn white outside the windows.

It was perfect, and it stopped snowing right after we finished the gifts and didn’t start again for the rest of the day!

everyone was super manageable with their gifts this year, so each of us had just a couple special ones for each other

the quilts

I started making quilts for the fam in…June, I think? I thought that if I started early I’d have them done early, but instead of that happening I just leisurely worked on them throughout the year and got them done on time.

I put together my visual ideas for each quilt in a Publisher document (complete with screenshots of each square pattern), and they ended up pretty much exactly how I imagined them, so it was definitely a success.

Each square (aside from the bird squares on Riley Mae’s) were created with individual FPP patterns bought from an assortment of Etsy shops.

The last step of this project was to do some hand-stitching around the squares (to hold everything in place), and that job murdered my fingertips (lots of stabs and scrapes), so I was especially grateful when I finished each one up and put them under the tree.

Riley Mae’s (bird themed, of course) & Mom’s (nature themed)

Dad’s (a compilation of his interests throughout his life) & Taylor’s (the ocean + cat)

christmas day

We were all so grateful that we took Christmas Eve for ourselves this year, because on Christmas day we went over to Grampa’s with the whole extended family for the annual holiday chaos.

My step-gramma announced that everyone older than highschool age wouldn’t be getting gifts, so instead she and Grampa ended up having a few “gift games.” One game was to do with picking numbers and prizes, and the other was to do with winning a card game for a crowd-funded jackpot and a $100 scratch ticket (ironically, less money would’ve been spent if the older grandkids just got a $10 giftcard!).

The games themselves would’ve been fine on any old day, but I feel like it resulted in a real vibe of “winners” and “losers” on Christmas, which felt like the exact opposite of what Christmas is all about. Most of us walked away with less than we came with, while only a couple people walked away with everything.

On a normal day people tend to turn incredibly competitive and often spiteful when it comes to family games, but it seemed even more dramatic when that energy was brought to a Christmas gathering.

my outfit was 10/10 but I didn’t get a single picture of it!!!

It made me kinda distraught, because when my cousins and sisters and I would sleep over at Grampa’s house when we were little he’d teach us Poker and Blackjack, and when one of us would lose all of our chips someone would toss us one of theirs just to keep us in the game and keep the fun going. Maybe we’d each get a quarter at the end of the game, but if not, we still had a grand time. I may not be sharing chips anymore, but I definitely still managed to hold onto that mentality when it comes to playing games: I play games to have good-humored fun.

Most of Christmas day was spent on those pre-planned games, so I didn’t end up having much time to actually sit down and talk to anyone individually. I ended up coming home pretty depressed, extremely exhausted, and feeling super disconnected from people.

The next few days I was so exhausted that I could barely get out of bed, and I don’t know if it was the annual letdown after Christmas, or if I just picked something up from the gathering. Thankfully I’ve had a bit more energy yesterday and today, and I’m getting back to some of my projects, although my body is still quite tired.

a 6×6 portrait shipped to NY for Christmas

pet portraits

I’m happy to say that I was successful in wrapping up another year of Christmas pet portrait orders — I got every one finished, mailed, and delivered in time for everybody’s holiday celebrations, and I didn’t even feel like I stressed or over-work myself!

January often tends to be a slower time for me in my shop, so I’m trying to be a bit more frugal with my spending right now (very hard to do when I keep having new project ideas, and have to buy extra Vitamin D supplements), especially when I know that taxes, car insurance, and the renewal of this blog will be due very soon.

my classic 3×3 portraits

My blog renewal comes up in January, and ever since I got the reminder to my email I’ve been wrestling with whether I wanted to renew it or not. The fact is that I don’t use it consistently these days, and paying for something that lies dormant for long chunks of time kinda feels like a waste when my funds are limited.

But after much consideration, I decided that I definitely need to keep it for the time being. I need somewhere to be able to post my projects that I’m super proud of, and since I know that most forms of social media destroy my mental health, this blog really is a lifesaver when I feel the need to share my work with a small portion of the world.

some beautiful birds on 4×6 paper

Anyways, briefly returning to the subject of my work: I introduced a 6×6 canvas option to my shop recently, and I sold a few of them in the Christmas rush. I wasn’t interested in painting larger portraits for a long time, but I’m enjoying this size now. I have the freedom to use bigger brushes and bigger brush strokes, and I think they’ve been coming out great!

two 6×6 portraits ordered as Christmas gifts

all in all…

Wrapping up 2024 feels good. Even though I had my fair share of rough patches throughout the past 365 days, I still think of 2024 as a pretty good year.

For the most part I’ve been happy on my own, doing my own thing, and there have been lots of seemingly-small changes in the household that have changed my day-to-day life (for the better!).

As for now, I have a few new creative projects that should be gracing my blog in the relatively-near future — the first one should be before and after pictures of me painting the deer skull that I used in this autumn photoshoot, assuming it turns out as well as my quilts did!

a very special 5×7 triple-pet portrait; options like this aren’t every-day items in my shop, but I love to take people’s special requests when they have doable visions for a portrait!

And on a closing note:

If you haven’t watched the new holiday movie Nutcrackers on Hulu, I would highly, highly recommend it. I found it to be so incredibly sweet and heartwarming and adorable that I bawled at the end of it (and cried again when I watched it a second time with my family!). Maybe I saw bits of myself and my childhood in the little boys who starred in it (alongside Ben Stiller), or maybe the subtle message of embracing your weirdness and not being forced to change and conform hit close to home. Whatever it was, it was definitely worth the watch!

(and after you’ve watched it, look up the backstory to why and how the movie was created!)