allsorts

This and that and the other

Hallow again! Just a quickie post to let you know that the fourth Night of Halloween is up, as well as the first, second and third!

And I have to say I am thrilled with the response to the Halloween garland! Thank you all muchly for your sweet comments on my last post. Y'all are the coolest! And please share pics, I'd love to see your creations.

Oh, I got the nicest request today from a museum in British Columbia asking permission to use my photo of the Advent Calendar I made last year. They saw it on Flickr, and want to use it in a class teaching children about Christmas countdown traditions as a way to preserve the heritage of their community. Isn't that a cool thing?

I have a few more things I want to do for Halloween before I get swept up in the crazy vortex of Christmas. Did you know there is an entire graveyard's worth of tombstones stacked up in the attic? But I don't think those will come out this year. Once one's kids are grown one doesn't have as much of an excuse to decorate, does one?

Cheerio,

Jenny

Halloween freebie time

Hallow boys and ghouls! Here is one of the freebies I hinted about on Friday. Thought I'd share hi-res files of the disc design I created for my banner. It works quite nicely for Halloween, printed out on index card stock and strung on rick rack. Or you can tie it with yarn or string like I did here. In order for you to decide for yourself what you want it to say, I made one for every letter as well as numbers. It might be fun for other purposes besides Halloween, too.

Here are the files, click on the one you want and it will open in another window (be patient, it will look huge) Then just save it to your desktop, print it, cut it out and string it up! Let me know if it works okay. Have fun!

 

 

I hope you think of lots of fun and creative ways to use these!

Cheers,

Jenny

A little WIP and a couple of corners

What a glorious day! We finally got our first nippy weather! Things are going great around here lately, and I think I've dug myself out from under the mountain of tasks I was buried under. Thanks for being patient while I took a semi-break from blogging. That and the new fall-ish weather has me feeling fired up and full of ideas!

What's been going on around here:

I pretty much finished up the buffalo illustration project and have moved on to the dinosaurs (including baby dinos... so cute!)

This month we were supposed to go see Katy in Providence, she just started at RISD. But work has pushed that trip to the back burner. We'll get there soon, I really want to see Providence (and Katy, too of course) and maybe get to meet Megan in person. Katy got to meet her at the RISD Alumni Sale last weekend!

Somewhere along the line I developed a problem with my right hand that has me wearing a wrist brace most of the time. Gives me a legitimate excuse to slack off on the housework around here. Haha! I take it off to work on the computer, but otherwise it stays on, even at night. I have to be careful not to conk Ro on the head when I roll over or I could do some damage!

I took a series of classes to learn how to use my new Bernina 240, and our group bonded so well we talked the teacher into doing a quilt class for us! The fabric in the above photo is some of the 36 fat quarters I've assembled for it. The design is called Crazy Nine Patch, and the class is next week.

Also in the pic are several other projects in the works, including the poor little felt bunny I showed several weeks ago, who has made no progress whatsoever. And I'm working out a couple of patterns I'll be sharing when I get them right. One for Halloween and one for Christmas!

Oh, the light is so gorgeous today! This is the one time of the year it shines into the dining room, normally its very dark and cozy in there. I've never been able to get decent pics, but I managed to get a couple that I think look okay. This is the huge fireplace:

It's still a bit too dark to see my favorite part, the antique pot that hangs inside. I didn't think I would like having gas logs, but its so nice to fire the thing up any time we eat in there, breakfast is especially nice with a roaring fire on a cold morning. And we have other options for wood fires, so this is perfect.

This is the corner to the left of the fireplace:

And panning further around. The chair was my great grandfather's:

Somehow I have managed to incorporate a fairly wide range of decorating styles into this house. We have rooms that work for different times of the year. The dining room is the most appropriate for Fall, and is perfect for Thanksgiving dinner. One of these days I need to share the mythology of the Homestead with you. Its an interesting story how we came to live here.

But I've done enough babbling for the moment thank you very much. Time to carpe the weekend!

Later gators,

Jenny

Zoe's back in town

Yes if it is October that must mean one thing... Zoe's back for Halloween! If you were around the blog this time last year, you may recall my insane obsession with creating the Zoe dress-up for Halloween series. For those of you who missed it, I'm putting it up on my web site again! I really want kids who were too young last year to have a chance to enjoy dressing Zoe up in her various costumes.

To recap, I wrote my own semi-dorky verses to the 12 Days of Christmas, and created this:

The first verse is now up, and you can click here to dress Zoe in her first costume! And then every few days up until Halloween, I'll make another verse available. Click on the button in the side bar to get to the main page and see which verses are up and ready to play with.

Have fun! I hope you like it!

And I'll have some more freebies and fun Halloween stuff for you soon. Stay tooned!

Cheers,

Jenny