I can't believe Christmas is 3 days away. I think I finished but still have a ton of wrapping to do. I am busy thinking about 2012 and a recent project of mine was to photograph and design the Cinnamon Snail 2012 Calendar! It was so much fun. I shot about half the photos used in the calendar and the others were shot by an awesome photographer then I got the pleasure to create vintage game boards boxes out of them! So much fun! Here are some of my favorites.

Early birthday gift

Excited to try and find some time to use these! Thanks alyssa!

Christmas

We got our tree today. We go to the Christmas tree farm every year and little bean got to see Santa. Lovely day except we are all sick.

I will be completely honest here. I prefer my tree just bare with only a bit of bead garland. But of course we will deck it out in all those felt ornaments I made last year.  No vintage ornaments until little bean is older.

Happy birthday! My husband requested my crumb cake for his birthday this year. So I made this vegan blueberry crumb cake.

It has been so long since I worked on some Asbury Park Illustrations. Researching the same material again and the material hasn't changed. In fact as much as the town has changed it hasn't. Isn't that the story of Asbury Park? This is part of a larger window painting I made back in 2004 for my husband it hangs in our "den". Which side tracks me for a moment. There are no names for rooms in our house that fit. Of course bathroom and kitchen and bedroom fit but our front room is sort of a mud room but not really, and then there is our dining room/sitting room/living room which is really the room we do everything int. And then there is the back room/tv room/den/playroom although we don't even have real tv and I am driven to not turn it on ever. I guess mostly I need to eventually set up an office/playroom/craft room. I can make space but maybe I don't want a messy room to clean up. Doing crafts in the open forces me to clean up as I go along. Feels so good to be illustrating again! A local shop wants to carry some of my abc posters

So a lot has happened these past 12 months, so much I won't go into here. But I now freelance full time and I love it. I love freelancing and illustrating and being a photographer AND getting to spend time with Little Bean while I do it all. Year of the rabbit indeed.

Bye Bye hair... cutting it off tomorrow.

Strictly shopping local this holiday. No big stores, no internet shopping this will help our economy far more than saving a few dollars by shopping at target, walmart, amazon, etc...
Sounding preachy I know but you might want to consider doing the same in your town. Some of my favorite RED BANK shops if you are LOCAL and haven't checked them out are
Funk & Standard Variety Store
Fragile Earth Stuffed Animals
Ten Thousand Villages Red Bank
T. Berry Square and
jacks music shop.
Of course I really love the consignment shops like Cottontails Children's Consignment and the Arc gently used is so much better for our environment than buying new.

ASBURY PARK is full of small independent owned business take a trip down Cookman Ave and Mattison and you can find wonderful things in all the shops. My personal very favorites there though are
Yoga Basin 
Foolish Ginger 
Humorandgrace 
Holdfast Asbury Park
and of course Parlor Gallery

Not to forget Organic Style in Ocean Grove! Not shopping in big stores and on the internet also helps our environment. What this all comes down to is in the end we must support our communities.

Rainy days. But keeping so busy. Spent some time at my favorite thrift store in search of costumes for Little Bean. I am planning on making a dress up case to give her for Christmas. I found a pink princess dress and a pair of ruby slippers and tons of books for her stocking. Little Bean reads constantly, I love my little book worm. Much work to do I am so happy and so fortunate but I took a break earlier for some much needed yoga. And now I am lost in a project trying to locate some vintage shots of the Palace Amusements from Asbury Park. I love this so much! This shot is from this past October The Humor and Grace Fashion Show at Lambs & Wolves.

Humor and Grace and Lambs and Wolves, a photo by jennymarmalade on Flickr.

playlist

I took my blogging offline for this past year and replaced it with some journaling but about 6 months in I fell off that wagon too. So for 2012 I am going to attempt to combine the two. Let's see how this goes? Blogging, journaling, photographing and sketching and GO!

A sneak peek of our holiday cards that Little Bean and I have been working on.

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