January's Postcard of the Month

White. Quiet.  Cold.  

I  really like this month's card.  Looks rather Art Deco-ish to me.*

It's really been too cold to try to spend much time at the studio

so for this month's card,

I decided to gather papers

(I'd just found and purchased 3 rolls of this off-white (and black) sheet-music wrapping paper above)

box up  glue, scissors, ink, brushes, heat-gun (for setting inks), etc.

- materials that I might need/want to produce whatever composition I still had to compose! -

and bring everything home to work on in our cozy (wood stove-heated) living room.

I keep stacks of plastic egg and cracker containers

(like @20x as many as what's shown here)

that have varying amounts of materials left-over/not used in past months' productions.

I decided to see what pre-prepped materials might suit my vague musings re: this month's design.  

I found enough of these little scraps of music

for this month's set of cards (appears in Step 13)

plus all the gold and silver squares

- which I'd actually prepped for a couple of larger collages.**

Nice.  Less prep for this month's production.  :-)

Wanted to use this beautiful little stylized deer stamp***

I did a couple of prototypes

decided to omit the gold threads, minimize the pink horizon, and NOT use the bleeding brown ink,

but otherwise... 

The Fixin's

The Steps: The Movie: 

The Steps

(27 this month - not including the rubber-stamping)

I started by rubber-stamping groupings of 3 deer****

 Panels of 12 of January's postcards

Fin.

*I'm so Klimt-crazy, and had just finished putting together this Klimt jigsaw puzzle - 'The Fulfillment'

**The gold and silver squares were intended for inclusion in these 2 larger collages  I was working on for a display at Espresso Bueno last summer.  I still haven't finished either of them!  

This first one - Arteries, 22" x 30" - was inspired by maps of downtown Barre:

This one - Untitled so far, 14" x 17" - was based on an image of a settlement of yurts:

***Which I'd used in an earlier January PoM - January, 2014. 

I've always really liked this one, too.

****Had to change from a nice brown ink to a black one - the brown bled, even after heat-setting.  :-/

Winter XXIII

Bird on a wire.*

Cold bird at the feeder.

I started the Winter cards in 1991, so XXIII (#23) confuses the math!  

(See Addendum for pix of all 23 Winter cards, plus the lone Crossroads card.)

Yes - I skipped a couple of years in the early 90s and then,

the postcard after Winter X was called Crossroads! = 3 non-Winters.

So that should make the math right...

I did make a prototype,

but the only difference between that and the final versions

was that I added the perfectly-named 'Ethereal' paper

- a tissue-thin/light fiber paper - to the bottom half of the cards.

The Fixin's

The Steps: The Movie:

The Steps

(a mere 7 steps this month/year!)

I started by tacking the silver paper behind the circular hole in the red and off-white sheet-music paper pieces, and decided to have some fun, since each piece was able to stand up on it's own:

It was going so well, that I decided to continue the fun:

Mustering my troops - my little paper army.  :-)  A total of 170+.

Reminded me of these ancient Chinese Terra Cotta soldiers:

Panels of 12 of the Winter XXIII postcards

Fin.

*Richard Thompson's rendition of this Leonard Cohen song:

**I sent out nice, store-bought cards, but felt like I was shortchanging my friends/loved ones, so I resumed making my own again in 1995.

Addendum - The Annual Winter Postcards + 1

Winter, 1991

 Winter II, 1992

 Winter III, 1995

 Winter IV, 1996

Winter V, 1997

Winter VI, 1998

Winter VII, 1999

Winter VIII, 2000

Winter VIX, 2001

Winter X, 2002

Crossroads, 2003*

Winter XI, 2004

Winter XII, 2005

Winter XIII, 2006

Winter XIV, 2007

Winter XV. 2008

Winter XVI, 2009

Winter XVII, 2010

Winter XVIII, 2011**

Winter XVIII, 2012

Winter XIX, 2013

Winter XX, 2014

Winter XXI, 2015

Winter XXII, 2016

Winter XXIII, 2017

*Crossroads: 2004 was a year of big transitions: I was turning 50, Mule retired after 30 years at IBM, and we decided to get married (after living together for 10 years).

**This was a printed postcard that I'd done for a BCA competition, and which I sent out instead of my usual, individually collaged cards that year because I was hustling to get all my Winter panels done for the debut 'Winter' show (Dec. 4, 2012 @ The Gruppe Gallery) - just didn't have time to make 150+ postcards that year!