Renaissance man Steve Lodefink has succeeded in putting together a rather unusual art show. CRANKbait! is a collection of 16 fishing lures by as many artists. Yes, I did say fishing lures. They’re all cool, and many have already sold. The one in the picture below is by Mr. Lodefink himself. Visit the gallery.

Now that I’m finished posting the new music we got for Christmas it’s time for one last seasonal item: the 2006 Sigler family Christmas card. This year we struggled for a concept. Should we collaborate on something? Should we continue to make our individual themed handmade items? Paris had the idea of snow people. We rolled with that and decided to stick with the tradition inside the tradition, individual pieces.

Clockwise from the top left:

• Paris used rolled colored paper strips.
• Mars obviously used Legos.
• Mary worked with yarn and felted the nose and hat. She also broke the mold with a two-ball shorty.
• Tracy after a few failed attempts decided to use three lamps, he had made a while ago, for a minimalist, and sort of boring, snow-bot.

Kodak now allows you to put a stamp-sized image on the back of the card. We used a pic of our four hands in the same orientation as the snow folks.

Here is a little construction Mars made a couple years ago when he was about seven years old. This is a recent picture. Like many artists before, Mars is using his art to comment on the oppression in the world around him. In this case, the oppression was a time limit for playing video games. A standard kitchen timer became the enforcer. By applying wings to the enforcer the artist has reshaped this symbol of his oppression into something of visual interest, even beauty.