Birds on a Wire

We're on a bird kick. These were our "Christmas" decorations. And by that what I mean is we designed them for Christmas but didn't actually get them up until January 7th. Don't judge us. In keeping with the season, we decided to stick to shimmery winter tones and swooping forms, and this time used some simpler materials.

Ugly pictures first:

For the base, John formed wire into three tiered hoops (the tiers being held together at staggered heights with white thread) and covered them with cream ribbon, which we just tied off with a knot.

One 10 yard roll of ribbon covered all three hoops.












And voilà! I named them ballerina hoops.








My one regret is that we didn't use more bird forms. We ended up with just two: one big, one small.

We attached them using pins:

And we tied the top off with a knot:

It has worked pretty well as a casual decoration to just keep up for a couple weeks. They're nice to have breakfast under and not so intrusive that we're getting sick of them. The only painful part was all the time it took to cut out the birds. (If you're cutting them out by yourself, budget about two hours. Other than that, it only takes about an hour to put hoops together, wrap them, and hang the whole thing.)

Thanksgiving and Thanks Giving

WE HAVE INTERNET! Not only do we have Internet, but also—after several hours of repeat phone calls to Comcast and Netgear—we have a connection that works. So John and I can stop pilfering whatever signal happens to be floating around in the air, which invariably dies out before a post is complete. So, that being said, I'm sorry it's taken so long to get this thing going, but now that we're up and running, we couldn't be more excited about it. Here's the post that I've been dying to publish since November.
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I have a new theory on Thanksgiving.

Studies consistently show that grateful people are substantially happier and that practicing gratitude is one of the few things a person can do to increase their overall levels of happiness in a sustainable way. One study showed that people engaging in gratitude exorcises are 25 percent happier than those who do not. (Twenty-five percent!) Another study concluded that "daily gratitude exercises resulted in higher reported levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism and energy. Additionally, the gratitude group experienced less depression and stress, was more likely to help others, exercised more regularly and made more progress toward personal goals." That's a lot of really great output for a surprisingly easy input.

So here's my theory: What if one of the main reasons the holidays are traditionally thought of as a happy time is that they are traditionally initiated with a whole day devoted to gratitude? What if we're doing ourselves more of an injustice than we realize by inching Black Friday sales into Thanksgiving Day, distracting us from one of our main sources of happiness with toys of momentary satisfaction? Just a thought.

Regardless, we had a great Thanksgiving. John got the table done just in time. And it's marvelous. (He designed it like a giant table puzzle; no screws necessary, so it can be disassembled easily to be moved or stored.)


So Thursday morning, before we started simmering a single thing, the decorating began.

A short expedition to Sligo Creek Trail had produced a birch branch that John trimmed up and got looking presentable. And with a few eye hooks drilled into the ceiling and some thin wire, it was up in no time.

Then we moved on to the birds. John found an amazing light-weight clay that doesn't get hard until you bake it (test: I left a half finished bird out on top of a heat-blowing radiator and ignored it for a week and a half until finally getting around to it Thursday morning—still soft.) It's fantastic stuff. So with that and a nature book on bird watching he picked up at the library, we made these:

We threw in a few candles left over from wedding decorations.

Fortunately, John had just pruned the lime tree in our living room, so after digging the cut branches out of the discard pile, we had some color.

I'm still no good at photography (as you see), so I apologize for the lousy pictures.

But now that we finally have (hopefully) reliable Internet, we'll be able to post more regularly.

Coming soon: Christmas.