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?
