A great way to end the year!

Many, many months ago, I wrote about the Tea Party Challenge being sponsored by Cloth Paper Scissors magazine and their call for tea-themed artwork. With more than a bit of trepidation, I made a small wall hanging and e-mailed my photos of it to the editors. When I received a "Dear Artist" e-mail from them in July, I was overjoyed to find out my work was being considered for publication!

I had to mail them my wallhanging, wondering all the while if A) my little Mod Podged and hot glued creation would survive the postal trip and B) if it would then make the cut for publication. I later got the piece back in the mail with a nice thank-you note and word that the Tea Party Challenge entries would be appearing in two issues of the magazine, November/December and January/February. When mine wasn't in November/December, I just thought oh well, even if I'm not in the next issue, at least I had a good time making the thing!

I've been watching the Cloth Paper Scissors website and saw the new cover was up, but it said the new magazine wouldn't hit newsstands until next week. Then yesterday, I was in Hastings where my friend Joanie, who knows more about magazines than anyone else in Newnan, and who knew I'd been waiting for it, told me the new Cloth Paper Scissors had arrived! She very thoughtfully stopped what she was doing to go pull the not-yet-on-the-racks issue for me, and this sweet friend was by my side as I flipped through the magazine and discovered my own artwork inside! How exciting is THAT! I enjoyed seeing the tea-themed artwork in the last issue, and I enjoyed it even more this issue, although I'm surely biased. There's a whimsical teapot made from a cigar box, an Australian artist's beautiful green-hued collage, a "heavenly" piece featuring some angelic tea drinkers, a "Tea for the World" piece that used old maps and keys and reminds me of the folk art I so love, a gorgeous "Pink Teacup" painting, a tea packaging collage that is just beautiful and so *perfect* in its execution, and my personal favorite, Florida artist Lisa Mallette's lovely canvases which incorporate text from book pages into her designs of a teapot, slice of cake and cup of tea. What a nice way to end the year in tea!