Delores Thompson has been getting a head start on Christmas.

She sits with a box of small Christmas bulbs before her, a few of them filled with sand colored white and red and green. They're so pretty that when one cracked, she repaired it with putty.

"They're hard to work with because you can mighty easily break them," she says, admiring a bulb held gingerly between her fingers. Behind her, boxes and boxes hold other specimens of her sand art - about 200 in all.

Despite the size of her collection, the St. Joseph woman hasn't been at this particular endeavor for long. She started only last August, after helping with sand-art projects during Eastside Baptist Church's vacation Bible school. The school ended, but she went on doing the craft - making use first of all the bottles and jars she could find in her possession, then seeking them out in craft stores and thrift shops and wherever else she could find them.

Ms. Thompson has made art from salt and pepper shakers, from jelly jars, from light bulbs. She's used ornate vases and small plastic globes from gumball machines. She has one bottle shaped like a Christmas tree, another in the form of a fish. A favorite is a set of beaker-shaped containers that came stuck together, now filled to their brims with bright colors.

But she does more than simply pick a container and start pouring. Using a dowel rod, she forms designs with the sand, then packs in cotton to keep the sand from shifting. And sometimes, after the holder has been sealed off, she decorates its top with glitter glue, a button or part of a Styrofoam ball that holds the stems of silk flowers.

And even then, Ms. Thompson's work isn't finished.

"You have to inspect them every so often to make sure they aren't moving," she says, referring to the occasional tendency of the sand to shift. "You'll think you have them done, but bingo, you don't."

This effort shows a work ethic that's carried over from as long ago as she can remember, going back even to her childhood at Fortescue School, northwest of St. Joseph, where she didn't miss a single day in 12 years. She spent the next 40 years teaching school and moving from state to state with her husband, a minister who died in 1992.

Ms. Thompson knows another woman who just lost her husband and plans to send her one of the sand-filled bulbs, a sign of care and support from someone who has been there. She also sends her light bulbs - with handmade cards - to people in the hospital.

"Or when they've been real bad sick at home," she adds. "Just to say, 'Let that bright light shine through.'"

As for all her other art, she'd like to have a sale but knows she wouldn't be able to offer the yard-sale prices people would expect. So for the moment, it surrounds her, and she enjoys it.

"I love it because it's just different," she says. "You look at it and see one thing, then you turn it upside down and see something else."

Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached

at ewisdom@npgco.com.