Santa Class Confidential

 Here is my Santa project from last Saturday's FACE class taught by Pat Shafer.  I love my Santa, but we have been laughing that he may be just a little too pretty.  Sandy says it is the eyes that Mrs. Santa fell for.  Colleen says the eyes definitely have that 'come hither' look.  It is definitely a Santa with a certain twinkle in his eye.  With those rosy cheeks, I would hate to think he had one too many egg nogs.

The class was great and here are a few things we learned.  The bottom of the pupil is a lighter shade of blue or brown than the top.  We worked in 3 values for the face.  The lightest shade, Pat taught us was in the center of the forehead, alongside the nose and cheek bones.  I high-low hooked the eyebrows and mustache at Pat's suggestion and I love the way it came out.  I am going to add a wider black border.  This Santa will become a pillow, like the one I showed a few weeks ago, that I did in a more primitive style.  This is Kathy Morton's Santa of the Mittens.  I have all of her Santa patterns on hand.  We are doing another of these FACE classes next week with another batch of rug hookers, then…..we decided in February we are going to do a class with black or mahogany Santa faces.  I think those will be fun and challenging too.  Let me know if you would like to be a part of these great one day classes here at the store.  Pat Shafer brought all her talents as a china painter as well as a rug hooker to the table for this one.  Everyone in the class learned a lot and each of us made a Santa with a very unique look.

And now to the very important topic of BLUE.  Here is a picture of him the day we brought him home.  He looks so tiny here with me on a Sandhills road side.  He was 7 1/2 weeks old and weighed about 13 lbs then.  He is now 9 weeks old and weighs in at about 17.5 lbs.  The center picture
shows him making friends with our old barn cat Tiger Lily.  He wanted her to play….she let him know she considered him an insipid youth.  That did not keep him from trying.  He is also making progress with his 2 old lady dog friends.  He idolizes Biscuit the black lab, but since he is more Torrey, the blue heeler's size, he harasses her more frequently.  She has no patience for his nonsense, but her growls have little affect on Blue.  His feelings rarely get hurt for more than a few seconds and then he is back at it.  I told Carl I was feeling sorry for Torrey until this afternoon, when I saw her go wake Blue up from a sound sleep.  Here we were, all peacefully enjoying this respite from his antics…….and she had to go purposely wake him up.  Obviously she enjoys the nonsense as much as he does.

Below is a picture of Blue enjoying his bed in my voice studio at the theatre.  He slept for over 2 hours of voice lessons on Wednesday.  I don't know how he did it, with children coming and going and stepping over him to make copies, piano playing and all the singing and singing and singing.  But he did.  He is obviously a natural at being a theatre dog and a store dog.  The fit for him is like a glove.  He has not had an 'accident' anywhere, rides in the car like it is his life and is clearly a genius of a little (soon to be big) dog.  Monday we go for our first official haircut.  I will post a picture after the new hair-do.

Have a good week.
Janice