October

 October is the one time in the year that you find a pumpkin on our step.....and the one time I have lots of orange things around the house....i love the warm and earthy colours of this mellow month and am sorry it has gone by so fast  so that here we are already on its very last day....

 .......i found some lovely decorations this year......sweet little pumpkins on sticks, golden yellow gourds...

 .............which i kept in the potting shed until it was time to decorate the house.........

 .........and my favourite florist in our little town had made adorable little garlands of chinese lanterns ....

 ......perfect to festoon the potting shed, or the kitchen windows, where they look beautiful when the sun sets  behind them and they form a delicate silhouette.....

 ......the Halloween bunting i made last year is making a spooky reappearance on the mantlepiece, and there are lots of sweeties waiting in a bowl near the front door ready for this year's little trick or treaters to call......

 ......before i go, i'd like to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who is taking part in the Battersea Doggie Bag campaign mentioned in my last post...and thank you to The Making Spot for featuring it on both the Mollie Makes blog and the Cross Stitcher blog....the campaign is set to run for quite a while so i am leaving a link in my sidebar.....

.....and i couldn't go without showing you this little doggie too....it was my dear grandson Charlie's fourth birthday last week and he is a born dog lover.....so besides all the classic boy's toys he wanted for his birthday i made him this special little felt doggie too......
Thank you for visiting me today, and for all your sweet comments on my last post...and the lovely emails too....wishing you a happy Halloween and a wonderful week ahead.....back soon. xxxxxx

Pirates and Pumpkins

The BIG pumpkin has been made into soup, now in the freezer, and this smiley lantern is all ready to beam out cheerfully to the children who call on us for sweets on Halloween night. I like the old traditions of carving lanterns, ducking for apples, and more recently giving out sweets to local children who dress up for trick or  treat - but nothing threatening or scary, not me, who can't bear scary movies of even the mildest kind!

Yesterday it was Charlie's 3rd birthday and Mr P took the morning off work (so did I but it's not quite the same thing!) and we went to wish him Happy Birthday and to give him his present - a wooden Pirate Ship complete with little pirates, treasure chest,a working anchor,cannon, sails with skull and crossbones....

It was sweet to see the little hands and the big hands assembling this wooden ship...my favourite bit was the stripy sails! I do love children's toys, especially wooden ones, or handmade sewn and knitted toys, though I also think some contemporary brightly coloured plastic toys can be gorgeous and well designed too, and children love to play imaginatively with them.

Thank you to those who kindly asked me about my choice of recipe after all my cook book browsing the other day.I decided to make Jools's Favourite Beef Stew from Jamie Oliver's book Jamie's Dinners. I know the family all love this dish as we had it last winter, and it will cook for ages in the aga so I don't have to worry about it all the time.

And finally here is my little blackboard planter filled up for Halloween weekend with some autumn garden snippets - berries, ivy, rosehips, some pretty leaves and the wonderful pink sedum flowers. I wish you all a wonderful weekend and a Happy Halloween!

Spooky Sewing

I have had this purple pumpkin fabric around for years, part of a Halloween themed bundle of printed cottons that I just had to buy at the time, not knowing why but...well I've said it before...some day it will come in handy! So I decided to make some speedy Halloween bunting for our sitting room mantlepiece. I cut the fabric into triangles using pinking shears and sewed it to a length of smooth cream string, and soon it was done!

Another little Halloween make is this small heart. I wonder if you recognise the fabric, or have bought it yourself perhaps - it's the Liberty fabric I got at the V&A Quilt Exhibition earlier this year. It was a popular print and lots of people I know seemed to choose it, as well as the other colour way on blue. I knew this fabric reminded me of something.....and for me it's perfect for an autumn project.

So I made this little padded heart to hang up in the kitchen, adorned with one of my favourite pumpkin buttons from Mill Hill and a little greeting printed using rubber stamps on a scrap of bias binding.
In my studio this week, though, it's springtime, and I am imagining blossoms, birds, early roses, butterflies and  the pretty flowers and scent of lilacs and lavender.....the lovely thing about our changing seasons is just that - the pleasures of each one are soon over but we can look forward so much to the next, and the next....
Have a lovely week. x