✦ The Craftsman’s Review ✦

Australia’s Handmade Holiday Edition

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2 days ago | Advertorial | Leonie Strachan

“My hands can’t paint the whiskers any more.” Why a 74-year-old Daylesford grandmother is selling her last cat advent calendars at a special price

For fifteen years, Rhonda Kilpatrick sculpted and painted 24 tiny cats for every calendar she made – each one a portrait of a real cat she once took in. Now arthritis is ending it. These 240 calendars are the very last.

Daylesford, late October. The old corrugated-iron shed behind Rhonda Kilpatrick’s weatherboard house smells of turpentine and eucalyptus. On the long bench under the window stand rows of tiny cats, no taller than a thumb – some still bare white, some already wearing little red Santa hats, gold crowns and knitted scarves. The louvres are wound open to let in the spring air. A grey tabby named Banjo sleeps on a folded crocheted rug next to the brushes.

Rhonda picks up a brush so fine it has maybe a dozen hairs, and stops. “This is the part I can’t do any more,” she says, holding out her right hand. The knuckles are swollen. “The whiskers. The little highlight in the eye. My hands shake now, and if I push through it, I can’t sleep for the pain.” She puts the brush down. “Seventy-four. I reckon it was always going to end somewhere.”

Her doctor told her the same thing back in autumn, only less kindly. The arthritis has been creeping into her fingers for years. This spring it reached the point where she can paint for an hour in the morning, and then the hand is finished for the day. That is not enough to keep going – but it was just enough to finish one last batch.

It started with a half-frozen kitten on the verandah

In July 1978, Rhonda was a young art teacher at the primary school in Daylesford. One frosty winter morning she found a white kitten curled up against her front door, so cold it couldn’t stand. She wrapped it in a tea towel, set it by the oven and called it Snowball. “She lived nineteen years,” Rhonda says. “And she started everything.”

Word got around. Strays, farm cats nobody wanted, old cats from the local shelter – over 48 years, more than 300 of them have passed through her house. Some stayed for a few weeks, some for twenty years. She remembers every one of them.

Twenty-four doors for Brianna

In 2011, the year she retired, Rhonda wanted to make something special for her granddaughter Brianna, who was seven. She sat down with a block of clay and sculpted 24 cats from her past – Snowball first, then the grumpy Persian everyone called Duchess, the tuxedo cat who came from the shelter at twelve and lived to twenty-one, the old grey tom with the beard. She painted them, hid them behind 24 paper doors and gave Brianna one to open every morning in December.

“By Christmas Eve she had met my whole family. Every cat I ever loved was hanging on her tree.”

Then the neighbours saw it. Then the women from church. That first year she made eleven calendars. The next year, forty. Fifteen years and close to 1,900 calendars later, she still sculpts every original by hand, casts the cats in her own moulds out in the shed and paints every face herself. Snowball has been on the front of every single box.

The process has never changed. Each original cat is sculpted in clay at the kitchen table, sometimes from an old photograph, sometimes from memory. From that original she makes a mould in the shed, casts the little cats one tray at a time, and then the slow part begins: base coat, fur, the outfit, the eyes, the nose, the whiskers. “The face is everything,” she says. “Get the eyes wrong and it’s just a cat. Get them right and it’s Pumpkin.”

What makes Rhonda’s calendar so special

Most advent calendars end up in the recycling bin on Boxing Day. Rhonda’s is built the other way round. Behind each of the 24 doors sits a three-dimensional little cat – round head, sculpted fur, tiny paws – painted by hand and fitted with a small gold loop, so it can go straight onto the Christmas tree.

And every cat comes with a story. Pumpkin, the ginger in the Santa hat, pinched a candy cane off the tree every single December. Sparky, the Bengal tangled in Christmas lights, is exactly how Rhonda found him one morning in 2009. Grandpa Gus, the grey tom with the white beard, was the oldest cat she ever took in – and the gentlest. “People write to me and tell me which one looks like their own cat,” she says. “There’s always one.”

“Why not just buy one of the cheap ones online?”

Two years ago, a large gift company from Sydney sent a man to Daylesford. He wanted to license Rhonda’s cats, have them copied in a factory overseas and sell them in the shops right across the country. “He said I’d never have to pick up a brush again,” she says. “I said that was exactly the problem.” She turned him down.

“They would have printed a million of them,” Brianna says. “Nan’s whole point is that there are only ever a few hundred, and each one went through her hands.”

Since then, look-alike cat calendars have started to turn up on the big discount sites and bargain apps, often for a few dollars. At first glance they look similar. Hold one in your hand and the difference is obvious: flat printed cut-outs instead of sculpted cats, the same stamped face on every figurine, paint that sits on top like a sticker, no loop – or one glued on that comes off on the first branch.

“A machine can make a cat shape,” Rhonda says. “It can’t make Duchess. It doesn’t know she always looked at you like you owed her money.”

Her advice, if you are unsure what you are holding: turn the cat sideways. A real figurine is sculpted all the way round. Then put two of them side by side. If the faces are identical down to the last whisker, a machine painted them.

The last 240

This Christmas, Rhonda is putting her brushes away for good. The final 240 calendars are stacked on the shelf in the shed – every figurine cast, painted and checked. “There is no one to take over,” she says. “And I won’t hand my cats to a factory. So when these are gone, that’s it.”

Earlier this month she still went to the spring market in town one last time, just to say goodbye. Women she had sold calendars to ten years ago came by her stall to show her photos of their trees on their phones – the same 24 cats, hanging there every December. “That’s when I knew it had all been worth it,” she says.

She has also made a decision about the price. The calendars always sold for A$178 at the Christmas market in town. These last ones will go for A$89. “It was never about the money. I want my cats to end up in homes where somebody will hang them on the tree every year and maybe tell their grandkids about the old lady in Daylesford who made them.”

Brianna, now 22, is handling the orders. “Nan doesn’t do computers,” she laughs. “So I’m the one running back and forth to the post office.”

What customers say

Rhonda keeps an old shortbread tin under the workbench, full of cards and letters from people who bought her calendars over the years. Some send photos of their trees. Some write about a cat they lost. A few of the newest messages came in this spring:

Where can you get one of Rhonda’s calendars?

Rhonda’s calendars are only available through Cedar & Tin, an online shop for real handwork from small makers, where Brianna runs her nan’s little corner. Every order is packed in Daylesford and dispatched within 1–2 business days via Australia Post. There is no wrong day to open the first door, Rhonda says: “Start the day it turns up. The cats don’t mind.”

With the special price, the last 240 calendars are not expected to last long. Once they are gone, there will be no restock – not this year, not ever.

The verdict

Rhonda’s Cat Advent Calendar is the rare advent calendar you don’t throw away. Twenty-four little cats, sculpted and painted by hand, each with a story – and by Christmas Eve, a tree full of them. For cat lovers, for grandkids counting down to Christmas, or for anyone who still misses a cat of their own, it is a small piece of real handwork that comes back out every December. Thank you, Rhonda.

Advertisement. This article is a paid promotion for products sold by Cedar & Tin. Names, people and quotes in this story are used for illustration. Individual experiences may vary.