Here's a walkthrough of how I create these cute cards with dogs chasing cats up the trees. First thing I must do is find all my pieces.

In this case I had to go to the beach and look for more twigs that represent the trees. I needed to have like a Y shape to it so it looks like the cat has climbed the tree and is looking down on the dog that is anxious to play with it.

Then I have to sort through my glass and find the appropriate pieces for the heads, bodies, ears and tails if possible. Sometimes I can't find the appropriate pieces so I will draw, for example, the cat ears. In most cases I tend to be pretty successful in finding the right shapes; it just takes a lot of patience to sort and sort and sort. At times I have to walk away from it because I'm at a standstill and can’t find the pieces I'm looking for. Then I turn back to it a few minutes later and there it is right in front of me, the piece I wanted. So sometimes I have to take a break and give my eyes a rest then go back with a different mindset. Maybe stop looking for ears and start looking for heads and all the sudden I find the ears that I was looking for originally. Once I find all my pieces, I lay it out on the card to see how I want it to fit. With the cats I use a clear glass but clear on white paper doesn't really show well so on the backside of the glass I will apply some stripes of color with my markers. My cats are usually orange tabby cats because it just shows up best in my mind. I draw the ears on the cats because I don’t have small enough pieces for ears. Once I finished laying it out the way I want it to be, coloring my cats and allowing the color to dry a bit, which is an important step because if the marker color is still wet when I apply the glue the glue will absorb the color and create like a mark in the color section so the color section will not be consistent.

The next step is to add some color to the card itself. I feel these cards need a blue sky and some green grass so I pull out my pastels and set down a bit of color. Now I can start gluing things down. I paint on the eyes and the noses with acrylic paint just give a little more definition.

The final touch on all my pieces of art is to sign it. As my name is Cynthia which sometimes is quite long on a small piece of art, I sign all of my work with Cyn.

​I wanted to incorporate the seashells I have with my idea of creating Christmas trees. I took it one step further and used an idea that someone else was doing and I added sea glass to the seashell idea. 

The tall tree on the left, although it looks pretty good in the picture, is actually quite misshapen on the other side, but for a first attempt it looks okay. This tree was made using my cone shape method. As shown on the right, first I found all the pieces I wanted to use and laid them out in the shape. Then I took each shell and had to find an appropriate piece of glass to go in the hole. I then glued the glass in and laid it back into position on the pattern, adding some glue to where the shells touch and continued until it was all filled with glass and back in place. Once it dried enough I wrapped it into the cone shape, added more glue to the shells, held it in place with a lot of painters tape and let it dry overnight. As I said earlier it's a wonky shape but I've learned a lot about this method and will probably try it again with my improvements to see how a second one will turn out.

The smaller tree, on the right in the picture above, was made with my stacked method. I used a different type of shell but one which also has a nature occurring hole in it. The first step with this method was to collect all the shells I wanted to use and find appropriate pieces of glass to glue into each hole. Once they had all dried I started building my stacked tree. This method is much easier than a cone tree but unfortunately finding enough similar shells in varying sizes will be a challenge. I really like this style and will make more of them with the shells I have. I think in the future I will only use dark green glass in the holes because as you can see from the picture on the right the light green just looks white when the light is shining through it.

​​I'm thinking that I will have to take another look at all the shells I have to see if there are more varieties or pieces that I can use to make trees. I might have a real "tree farm" available with many styles to choose from by the time next market season comes along. 

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