Crafting (Minus Some of the Love) and Fall

For someone who doesn't really craft (remember when it took me six years to finish my Halloween witches?), I've sure been doing a lot of crafting lately. 

I think it started with this new house and the feeling that it might be fun to have holiday garlands in my big kitchen/living room windows ... only to discover that all the garlands one might ever find to buy were either too short or too expensive (or both). 

I quickly realized I would need to take matters into my own hands.

And thus the crafting. 

I'm no true crafter though. When I started on those yarn pumpkins, I was shocked that they actually took a decent amount of time. When I complained about this, Daisy explained something to me that I had not in the least understood. It was that one must craft not solely for the product but also "for the love of crafting". 

Hmm. Well. 

(Because the love was not wholly there, for my next pumpkin garland I skipped the yarn, bought a set of cheap velvet-looking pumpkins on Amazon, and hung those from twine. Nearly as cute and much less time-consuming.)

And, of course, I've found some things that a true crafter might have made all on their own, but I simply bought. Like these cute little friends making my house plants feel fall-ish.

And, as luck would have it, we got a surprising number of accidental pumpkins!

We didn't get a proper pumpkin patch going this year, but we had thrown all last year's leftovers into the pasture for the steers, and several sprouted. I thought there would be maybe seven in there. But there were all of these! A lot were quite small, but still a fun surprise! I can never have too many pumpkins. (We might even go so far as to say I can never have enough pumpkins.)

Speaking of fall: the Harvest Moon! (Isn't the sound of that just lovely? It's wonderful that we have a moon we call the Harvest Moon.)

This bottom one was taken when our smoke detectors all started going off before dawn Saturday morning. It took a solid half hour before we could figure out which one was faulty and get them all stopped. For a while I left Mike and Jesse to it and escaped the beeping by going outside--where the Harvest Moon greeted me.

And sort of related to Halloween coming: Daisy and Penny went as Wirt and Greg to FanX this past weekend:

If you've seen the strange, little series of Over the Garden Wall (it's not for everyone), you'll see them with this random person/wolf/dog and want to say, "You have beautiful eyes!"

A few of their cousins met them there as well.

Lastly, The Rental didn't have any deciduous trees. Not one! So it's quite happy to look out the windows or pull in our driveway and see leaves changing colors! (Though I still miss the amazing reds of our Pleasant View backyard maples. But my good Mike--who forever is thinking of the things that I love--bought me three the other day that we will try and get to grow here. Maples have trouble with low iron and with too much water, so we might have a hard time succeeding, but we got a variety that are supposed to be more water tolerant. So my fingers are crossed! In the meantime we have a smattering of red leaves sitting right next to my porch on these new trees, and I'm loving things turning yellow everywhere else around here. (There's not a week that goes by that my mind doesn't rejoicingly praise my father-in-law Alma for planting so many trees here! I don't even know what inspired him to do it. Certainly he couldn't have known then that it would be for us! I'm so grateful!)

Welcome to fall and holidays and decorating the house!