packaging

One of the things I love about etsy is the gifting culture. Most of my etsy purchases come in the sweetest little packages. Tiny handmade cards, personal notes, and other sweet bits come standard....yet not quite expected enough to preclude finding myself cooing as I open a package.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, I bought these.Which came to me like this:

See?! What a happy little-treat-I-buy-for-me! Hooray for the small stump!

This is my standard bitty packaging:

pumpkin clay

Around this time of year, I start to think very pumpkin.

A favorite fall activity for me is to beg and borrow some red clay off of a studio mate and make a batch of them. I leave the clay unglazed for the pumpkin part, and add a bit of green for stems, glazing the interior of the containers to be better suited for candy corns.

Pictured is part of the 2005 batch (fall of 2006 fell during a pottery hiatus).

This year, I bought my own, and invited a batch of my favorite kiddos to play clay, then forgot to take their picture...but here are a few kid-free illustrations. Plus a few more pumpkins I've been working on.

tragedy

we went to the most amazing fairy birthday party today.

i took 300 pictures.

then found out the memory card wasn't in my camera...

i am very sad.

summer building

Two weeks into school, what I miss most about summer is the t i m e .

Time that allows building. Two examples: tree blocks in the playhouse, and classic block village in the living room (late at night when I had to take a picture before cleaning them up, as you can see from the photo quality).Plus time for a really rollicking band!

one year of sweetness

Amari and Ellee, my nieces-to-die-for, both turned 1 in August. I made them these, still trying to match what their moms told me long ago were their nursery colors.
pink & brown for Amari
a sewing stars pattern
that I love, though I've given away all 3 I've made
& my girls are mad
pink & yellow for Ellee
my own design
it's kind of skwampy (a first-run), but wondrously huggy
and I hear she loves it
(Abby, send me the pics I've heard you have...)

coming in October!

And a together shot: Ian and Isaac, meeting Sparky.
Do you think they were excited about it?

July glory

I didn't write at all about our summer vacation, a month-long road trip west that was both glorious and terrible, as all good road trips should be. I have wonderful quilts and lots of petunia shots to sort through and share sometime, but for today, this photo of the girls and their beautiful Grandma Donna, my angel mum, highlights why the whole thing was, in the end, a very good idea. The only thing not quite clear enough in the photo is that those raspberry bushes were delightfully full of fruit. And it should be bigger: click on it and feel the sunshine!

laundry day

Monday is my laundry day (so I could watch 24 & Medium with good excuse while folding, originally), but delayed because of the holiday. Since Spring, laundry day means spending a lot of time in my backyard, once I was truly converted to the sensual treasure that is clothesline use.

The clothesline was interrupted today by a rather large branch that fell overnight from one of the 75-year-old towering sycamore trees in our yard. It also took down an electrical wire, luckily not lying there live, as the break cut it off from its power source. Eek. The girls were rather thrilled; it made the school departure almost interesting (returning after a one-day break is much less interesting than after the 3-month break was last week).

A peek at one of my favorite needle-felted creatures, a bulb baby, nestled at the roots of one of those same tremendous trees.

Yard related: coming out in late summer glory are the rose bushes along the back. I try not to like roses sometimes, thinking them unoriginal, but when I find myself rubbing my cheeks across a mass of fat blooms, heady with their warm and nostalgic scent, I realize they are still my favorites.

pokeberry ink

Audrey came in yesterday afternoon looking for the feather quill that came with her souvenir Declaration of Independence, then again, complaining that it only could write one letter...she was outside experimenting with her own pokeberry ink! I found my fountain pens, and suggested paper rather than writing on the swing set (!?) and we spent a delightful hour together.

back to school with wee wonderfuls

I was so enjoying the last bit of summer with these
that I didn't take the time to blog-celebrate the arrival of these.
Hillary Lang's wee wonderfuls blog was my first blog crush, and still the only one I check nearly every day. She has lovely ideas. I've seen a lot of great blogs, but prefer the craft ones. So many blogs, featuring their fantastic product finds, just make me want to BUY more. Those like Hillary's, though, make me want to MAKE more, and just LIVE BETTER. Making is kind of a problem with me, too, but at least it's much less consumptive than buying. The die-hard craft bloggers are fanatic thrifters and scrap hoarders, too, and it was a craft blogger who finally convinced me to get rid of my bad plastics (even plunked down the pile for this lovely Kleen Kanteen, which, by the way, was worth it. Without me even prompting her, Marian commented right off on how much better her water tasted in it).

I digress. I think what really sold me on Ms. Lang's talent was seeing this turtle king in her Flickr set. When patterns for the same showed up in her shop, I was ecstatic. I badly wanted the creatures, but was equally impressed with the charm of the patterns' layout, in sweet and accurate instructional tri-folds. I've put them away over and over again, but keep pulling them out just so I can see them.

You can see in the top photo that my darlings got wee creatures to hide in their backpacks for the first day of school. Audrey's is a butterfly and Marian's a turtle, which was serendipity since her marvelous new teacher has 3 turtles in the classroom. I have had a hard time taking a photo of them since the girls have refused to leave them home with me at all this week. Now that it's Saturday & I have daylight photo privileges, you can see the turtle's crown is a bit smooshed: she is already well-loved. Which was the point.