Christmas Corsages

I bought a box of little vintage ornaments for $5.00 at the Flea and decided to make them into Christmas corsages. Does anyone remember wearing a corsage pinned to their dress or banded onto a wrist at a past prom or holiday church service (my Mom)? Well it is a vintage idea I guess and this group of festive friends may end up on the Christmas tree together or on special holiday gifts?

Beeswax Ornaments

When Bill bought our house in Hopewell, the back carriage house had its’ western wall filled with honeybees and lots of honey. Shortly after we were married Bill decided to box up all those bees and start harvesting honey. Eventually we had enough beeswax collected to make something from it, and the above ornaments were the result. I made sixty red (add red crayons to the wax) and natural Santas and Angels last Christmas for our first tree at Old Farm! They looked and smelled so sweet.  I use a retired rice cooker to melt the beeswax in and inexpensive plastic candy molds to ladle it into with loops of embroidery thread added to the tops while just poured. The freezer cools them quickly and helps them pop out of the forms easily.

Christmas Musical Snowmen!

Here are Bill, Leif and Christian during a beekeeping session. The boys were quite apprehensive in those early days so I gave them bottles of blow-bubbles in this case. Later they both learned how to harvest or spin out the honeycombs, and Christian eventually kept his own hive next to Bill’s on our front lawn. Maybe we will bring bees to Old Farm someday after so much work gets done?