Family Time in Massachusetts

A few good pictures from Christmas :)

Santa Andover

We tried something a little different this year for Christmas - we did a Secret Santa. Chelsea, one of my friends, emailed us each a name individually. Meanwhile, to keep things anonymous, we each emailed the entire family our Christmas lists.

This is how it went down:

Dad's Secret Santa was Jason. Gift: USC sweatshirt.
Jason's Secret Santa was Christine. Gift: clothes, record, record player case.
Christine's Secret Santa was Me. Gift: Popsicle maker.
My Secret Santa was Dad. Gift: blender, winter blanket.
Alex's Secret Santa was Audrey. Gift: DJ Professional Mixing Music Technology
Audrey's Secret Santa was Alex. Gift: Portable Adjusting Table Cover

Mom mailed us our gifts to MA, and Christine made sure our stockings were extra full!

My highlight:

Christmas Board Games

As we all know, Leslie missed out on the Peck family board games while in Massachusetts for Christmas. Here is a picture of each and every board game we played. In no particular order: Boggle, Pachisi, Pictionary, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan. Let the suffering commence!

Art Class #2: Encaustics

My second art class at Visual Arts Center of Richmond was Introduction to Encaustics. I took the class with my friend Andra, who has an awesome blog and gorgeous pictures of the class. The class ran for 6 weeks in November and December 2011.

Essentially, you heat up various colors of beeswax, paint the wax on wood and wait for it to harden. You can manipulate the wax by heating it up with a heat gun or utilizing paper, rubber stencils/molds and utensils, etc. Each week we would learn a few new techniques. The biggest thing for me was learning to be open minded and having no preconceived notions of what I wanted the finished product to look like.