Its a snowy Monday in January. 2010 to be exact. Kids are back in school. The schedule of doctors appointments, work and efforts towards moving forward is back in full swing with the slow days of our holidays sadly behind us.

I will be working on catching up with the Hangar posters (Penelope rehash is below, and I am pleased with where it has gone). Also have the farm work for the artisan bakery as well. So, though our clients will be updating their emails and scheduling their work, we will have a bit more luxury to roll slowly into the new year.

I was tooling around the internet, researching whatever lamebrain stuff that floats through and lands in my interest box and came across something that ties some thinking together. I learned that nutcrackers and angel candle holders along with the holiday "pyramids" are grouped together as Erzgebirge folk art. Erzgebirge is a location in Germany on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic. There is a lot of mining there (silver etc) and the miners made these wooden objects as a way of earning more money on the side. A tribute to this work are the miner (bergmann) candlesticks (shown here on the wonderful Woodentoy.com site. The miners candlesticks are often seen with the guardian angels much like the illustration I did last week as a bow to the Erzgebirge angel I bought without knowing the full story/context of the piece. I am delighted in learning the context of these german objects I love--and finding out that all of the types of objects are related insofar as culture, who makes them and the thinking around them. Some notes on nutcrackers: the pure ones are often soldiers, kings or Knights--known to be collected from the Erzgebirge or Ore Mountains in Germany. Thus, the king. These guys are perfect for the symmetrical stuff I have been cranking out...and they make tremendous patterns too. There are more for this week as Epiphany gives me a bit more Christmas time for illustration.... And seeing that the Garden of Eden got recognized, maybe its time to do a little more on the Garden of Eden work?