Wes & Rachelle Siegrist

"Tiny Treasures of the Natural World"

Monthly Newsletters

Our christmas tree and fishtank in the living room of our home.
News: * Happy New Year to each and everyone of you and your families! We wish each of you a year filled with fun, laughs, love and heaps of wonderful memories! * We'll be featured in the upcoming spring issue of InformArt Magazine in an article about miniatures.
Our fat squirrels provide us daily entertainment from the views out our studio and dining room windows.	Click the image to watch Rachelle's The Angel and Her Duckie develop step by step.
Rachelle and our neighbor, Amy, pose at Abram's Falls.
Interesting Updates: * A new step by step painting has been added (see image above). We've also changed the format of the online newsletters to match the rest of the website. A new section of portraits has been added to the website. Rachelle plans to do at least one portrait mini each year. * We'll be unable to work on commissions until April due to needing all the time to paint for our exhibits and shows. Feel free to contact us to get on the list of future works.
A Look Back:
Rachelle beside some of our crafts and earrings during an Okeechobee, Florida Christmas Festival in 1992.	Wes and baby Spikey in our studio in Florida back in 1991. We both shared a 9x10' space which included our office and art storage (it was crammed) By 1993 Rachelle had moved her studio to the front room where we had our gallery. Back in those days our normal sized paintings were 11x14 inches or larger. Full size 22x30 sheets of watercolor paper paintings didn't work too well in the tiny studio when we were both working on one!
Our Adventures: * We spent the holidays with neighbors and friends. We plan to spend time with Rachelle's family and some of you on our visit to Florida this month. * We hiked to Abram's Falls with our next door neighbors. We've hiked the 5 mile trail numerous times but this was our first time in the winter. A picnic with temperatures in the 20's was fun and the ice formations at the base of the Falls were spectacular! * A generous neighbor gave us his old cedar fence which we took down and converted into a split rail fence in our side yard. The woodpeckers have already had fun with the logs and the resulting cavities will surely be home to many of our fence lizards this spring.
Wes with Amy and David enjoy a picnic at the base of Abram's Falls. We were actually a bit warm despite the temperatures in the 20's.
Critter Encounters: * Yard Bird List: 83 species. A Northern Mockingbird,Hermit Thrush and Winter Wrens were our species of note this month. The cute little wren had found his way onto the screen porch and it took Wes 15 minutes to convince him to fly out the open door. * Eight squirrels at one time on the deck with only four available feeders gave us plenty of great laughs one afternoon. We'll be painting one of our "Chesters" soon! * Coyotes have been active in the neighborhood. We've yet to spot them in the yard but we know they're there each night. The raccoons and possums leave tracks on the deck and in the compost pile so we know they're still swinging by each evening. * We had an up close encounter with two Golden-crowned Kinglets during our hike to Abram's Falls. Their golden striped crest was brilliant in the sunlight. * We've been blessed this past month with a Northern Mockingbird which has been calling our yard home. An everyday visitor and inhabitant of our home in Florida, Mockingbirds are quite rare at our home here in the woods and mountains. Watching this guy's cocky attitude is quite entertaining.
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