Photos on walks taken around Sirona Falls in the last week.

Hello Dear Friends!

I hope you all are staying warm as it gets chilly… I am starting my draft of this letter on the morning of November 10th (though I am sure it will be much later when I finish and send it!) and it has just snowed for the first time this year. Not much, but oh was it pretty to wake up to the gentle white snowflakes falling between the window and the dark green of the white pines outside. First snow observed from bed here! I love it. 

As we enter November, the holidays approach us. For Thanksgiving I will be going with my family to South Carolina to have lots of long walks on chilly beaches, but it will be warm enough to have bare feet in the sand (and a coat on, generally!) And I will get to see my cousins. It is a long standing tradition for us to gather there, my grandparents lived in South Carolina and my cousins are mostly still in North Carolina. As I reflect on the “Day of Gratitude” as I prefer to think of it, I am so grateful for so many things, most of all that I am happy to report that the new internet tower is working great, and I am teaching from home now. So again a huge thank you to the friends and family that helped me to make that happen. 

The other thing that Holidays approaching makes me think of, is that it is the season for all of us artsy people to sell things, so I would be remiss not to remind you that I have lots of small items for sale. I am not doing a huge online sale this year, but below I will include links to my calendars and cards and some remaining small works on my website, plus a few new works. There’s a 20% off coupon for original artworks that you can use 11/28-12/2. Calendar Pre-orders are due by the end of the day this Thursday.

This month I will talk about the dreaded drywall process, no one’s favorite part of construction! No new superhero but huge acknowledgment of Gary, Rebecca, and Tim and all of their help with the herculean task of so much drywall. For my nature spotlight, I want to talk about Dark-Eyed Juncos, a cute and unusual looking black-and-white sparrow that is ALWAYS present in my front yard, year-round, even on days like today where snow is falling! In many places they are seasonal, but I have habitat that is ideal for them year-round so I consider them my little friends.

Wishing you all the best, and full of gratitude to all of you for all of your support and for taking the time to read my newsletters!

Love,

Elody

Pictured above are the 2024 Calendars. Below are the images for the 2026 Calendars!

Support Me: Calendars, Card, Prints and Minis!

Last Chance for 2026 Calendar pre-orders!

Order these $30 5-packs by November 20th, that is this Thursday evening. I’ve been told that these make great stocking stuffers, hostess gifts, and little gifts for teachers, colleagues, and friends!

If you are local: Reply to this email and let me know how many you want and I will put you on my list. You will have various payment options, including the website link below, and we’ll arrange pick-up/delivery in early December.

If you will need shipping: go ahead and officially pre-order them through my website here so I have your payment and shipping address all in one place, and I will ship them off as soon as I have them. You will receive them well before Christmas, likely before December 10th.

Greeting Cards are available here.

No new designs this year, but lots left from previous years. Landscape and forest scenes, flowers, birds, owls. If you made a calendar order and later order something else, I will of course combine the orders. likely before December 10th.

Archival prints are available here.

There are six different print runs already made at affordable prices (mostly about $20 each) and other images available on request! Check the custom print option for painting images that are already prepared for printing, and feel free to inquire about any other artwork of mine. I will make a print for you of any of my works if I am able to come up with a high resolution image of it.

New Prints: “Hummingbird Love” Sets of 3 here.

A friend recently did a custom order of this set of three paintings, and I liked it so much I decided to make a new print run of it! The tryptic comes in three 8x8 prints that you can hang in any order, which changes the meaning and feeling of the piece. You can order it unframed or framed. The paintings show 1) a pair of closed, cupped hands, 2) a pair of open, cupped hands with a hummingbird resting on the palm and 3) a hummingbird taking flight from the hands. I think of “Hummingbird love” as a metaphor for how we love the people in our lives… love held captive and trapped, love that’s free to go at anytime but stays nestled in a safe haven, and love that’s been freed to go elsewhere as it needs. I personally like to arrange it vertically, with the flying bird on top and the closed hands at the bottom, but you can do as you wish!

Small Original Artworks Holiday Sale 11/28-12/2:

From 8am on Black Friday to midnight on Giving Tuesday, use coupon code GRATITUDE to get a 20% discount on all original artworks. Direct Links here:

Small & Medium Paintings are Here, Animal Drawings are Here, and other Works on Paper are Here. Have fun browsing!

The new 8x8 inch “Hummingbird Love” Print sets! Order them unframed or framed.

Above: My studio in stage. 1. framed, 2. with insulation and ceilings installed. 3. Drywall hung and spackled. Also, plywood sections for my working walls. 4. Freshly primed and painted, lights working. Below: I did not even get a photo of the finished studio with the finished trim and painted floor before I had to start moving my studio in.

Feature Project: Walls - Drywall Drywall Drywall!

As we discussed in the last newsletter, we happily opted out of drywall on my ceilings, but we really couldn’t afford to do anything else for all those darn walls. So, basically every wall everywhere is drywall. We hung and finished drywall on my side for months and months and months, it felt like forever. First, we did my upstairs studio, so we could finish that area in time for the big move of my studio stuff when I was asked to leave my rented studio by my landlord and thus rented a tiny little teaching office that could not fit all of my things. So July and August 2023 was a race against time to finish that big upstairs room and move boxes and boxes of paintings and easels and tables and art supplies into it. Once that was done, we set about doing the main floor of my house, the bedroom/living room space, Kitchen/entry, the laundry and the bathroom.

Each room involves first hanging the drywall. Each piece has to have perfectly located holes that fit perfectly over outlets and light switches and cut to be the right size and shape to have its edges land on the attachment points of the studs. In theory this should work out perfectly, with 16 inch centers on the studs and 48 inch wide sheets of drywall, but in reality there are often variables so it is not as tidy as you had hoped. Every mistake you make, including just scratches and bumps along the way, causes lots more work with the spackle later. The spackling takes strength as well as finesse and absolutely kills my right shoulder. I deal with a lot of chronic pain on my right side due to overuse as a painter. So, to preserve my dominant right arm for my artwork, I have taught myself to do a lot of the construction stuff left-handed. But I just can’t control the spackle knife well enough to do that lefty. Gary also has shoulder problems and frankly just does not have the patience for it, so much of the spackling fell to Tim, who is good at it but despises it. We called him the “Spackle-nator”for the duration of this process! Then I did most of the sanding, which is messy and miserable also, tiring on the arms and terrible for the lungs, but at least I could do most of it left-handed.

Finally, once it was all smooth and perfect, then comes priming. If you have ever re-painted a wall, just know that repainting is NOTHING like priming. The raw drywall and spackle is super absorbent. Both the primer layer and even the first coat of paint take a huge amount of paint and elbow grease to apply. The final coat then goes on so smooth, easy to spread and easy to get an even coat because the moisture is not being sucked away making the paint dry in two minutes. I would guess that for an area that takes an hour to prime, the first coat might take 45 minutes and the final coat takes only 20 minutes, and that is only because you are being super slow and careful to get a perfectly even surface. One thing we did to make it easier on ourselves is that we planned a trim detail on ceilings, inner corners, and baseboards, so I had very little “cutting in” to do with the paint (or spackle) because all of the very edges were ultimately covered with wood.

The most fun part, of course, was the COLORS! For each room, I spent several weeks fussing with colors, figuring out primary wall colors and accent wall colors and the trim color. Every room had at least three colors. As you might guess, every wall color in my house is a custom color (except for the white walls of the studio and laundry room) because the paint swatch options are never JUST RIGHT, even though there are thousands of colors! Shoutout to Josh at my local Hosterman & Stover hardware store for being patient with me and doing a great job creating all my custom colors.

After all that, we felt we just couldn’t handle it, physically or emotionally, to hang and spackle the entire guest side of the house too. So we did an incredible trade where our friend, another contractor Anders Olsen, did a partial trade with us where my dad built kitchen cabinets for a project he was working on and his crew helped us for a week hanging and spackling drywall. The trade didn’t cover all of it, and the crew did not do everything, but they did most of the rooms and did a very good job and boy was it a huge help and saved us so much time. What a relief! Lately we have been doing the remaining rooms and we are all reminded how much we don’t enjoy drywall and how glad we are that it is only a few rooms we are doing this time instead of basically a whole house.

Forgive all the whining and complaining about drywall! We’ll all be happy to never do drywall again if we can help it. It’s all worth it in the end, of course!

Above: Elody at work! Sanding and Priming, then COLORS! My happy place.

Above: Hanging Drywall! Left: Tim and Rebecca in a high place, Middle: Gary and Elody, & Right: Rebecca and Elody accidentally matching tops and poses while hanging drywall!

Above: Gary making some complicated drywall cuts for laundry.

Above: Spackling by Tim everywhere that was really important, and by me in the more hidden places like the laundry room and inside closets.

TIMELAPSE VIDEOS: Here is a video compilation of some drywall installation and painting on Instagram and on Facebook.

Superheros of the Month!

As mentioned above, no one new to feature this month. But I will take a moment to acknowledge everyone who helped with drywalling! Most of the drywall on my side of the house was installed by Gary (cutting the pieces) and screwed into place by Rebecca and I, or by Tim, working alone or with help from me and/or Gary. There was a day when Joe and Henry helped install drywall. As mentioned above, almost all of the spackling was done by Tim, who hates everything to do with drywall but he also happens to be very good at it, especially the spackling, so he got stuck with a lot of it. A labor of love! Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore, so we got Chris Adamski to do the last area (our entryway, which was also very tall and awkward to do, so we did a partial trade, partial paid work deal with him so he spent a few days spackling, sanding, priming and painting that area for us.) Other than that one area, I did all of the priming and painting on my whole side of the house, except for one day when Henry helped me prime part of my studio. I don’t really enjoy priming, but I (surprise surprise) take the painting very seriously and do a very careful job, so the truth is I hardly allow anyone else to touch the paint, because god forbid they leave a drip! The two exceptions were the aforementioned entry area that Chris spackled and primed and painted, and my childhood friend Anna who helped me to paint a stairwell up to my studio while visiting me. Why did I let those two paint? Because they are both just as anal about wall painting as I am! No drips left behind. Whew!

Adorable juncos! Photos again by my talented bird photographer friend Deb Rittleman.

Nature Spotlight: Dark-Eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis)

When I learned that Dark-eyed Juncos were sparrows, I was surprised. In size, shape, and behavior, it makes sense, but I think of sparrows as mottled and streaky brown birds. In comparison, juncos look like they are wearing tuxedos! They have smooth dark charcoal black/grey backs, white bellies and flashy black-and-white tails (white stripes running down either side with black in the middle, a distinctive pattern you tend to see as they fly away from you.) In different parts of North America they have different plumages, but none of them look like a typical streaky sparrow. They flit around on the ground and low branches, and especially in the winter forests in PA tend to congregate in large, twittering groups poking about on snow, dry leaves, or grasses looking for seeds. In many places they have the nickname “snowbirds” because they are commonly seen in winter, but in some cooler mountain areas like my place, they stay for the summer as well.

Learn more about Juncos here, and check out the many subspecies here!

I’ll leave you with a sunrise photo I took on November 7th. I woke and saw blazing pink light in the sky out my window, dressed in warm clothes as fast as I could, and dashed up to the lake. I caught the last few moments of pink before it all went grey.

Sirona Falls