Plums and Pumpkins

Here's a little more fall color in a series from Daughter L.'s best pictures file. Love Fall!

Fall

This fall postcard brought to you by God. No cost or obligation.

Harvest's First Swatch

First swatch of beans taken out tonight. That is just one trip through! (above)

Coming around again. Harvest begins.



The grain cart and tractor are ready to go. The old tractor as contrast.

The girls had to jump on the bales for a half hour before they could go home.

Extra Crafts

After making the darling felt Scotties last week, I had to try a black Lab. I altered the pattern and made this little guy. I still think it needs a bit of tweaking, but it's pretty cute.

There were a few questions about the handles on the buckeye nuts fairy pots and pans. (Earlier post.) Below are the tools used (greatly magnified for human eyes.) Needless to say, only mother or father fairies are allowed to do the cutting and wire twisting, but the kid fairies can dig out the nut meats and smooth the insides. The fairy wire is the equivalent of 20 gauge by human standards.

Buckeye Fairy Pans

Our Buckeye tree is again dropping its nuts, and we are enjoying collecting them. Apparently, this is the season the Woods Fairies collect buckeye nuts and fashion their pots and pans for the coming year. We were lucky enough to find a few fairy pots in the grass!

See them here by the dandelion plant in the grass? Look closely, they are easy to miss!

To get an idea of size, these two baskets and tiny pine cone are sitting in my camera lens cap.

Here are a few assorted pots and pans arranged for photos.

A plate, a fry pan, a spoon and even a spatula!

Fine Fairy workmanship.

A small stash in a woody copse.

Just the right size for a tiny pine cone for the Fairy fires.

One lovely basket by the watering can. Pictures by Daughter M.

More Felt Puppies

A purple patchwork puppy. W. wanted a puppy for herself, and wanted to be surprised like they surprised L. for her birthday. I made her this purple patchwork pup yesterday. There is a shot of his two toned tummy, too. The blue dog is the first one I made to try out the pattern before the girls made theirs.

Wet Beans

Well, it's been a wet fall. Here is one of our bean fields near the river. Not so good.

Co-op Art

We are in our third week of co-op classes. My art classes have been going well. I am teaching one class of 4th and one class of 5/6th. Our first week we worked on portfolios and lettering. My example for the portfolio referenced two artists, Jasper Johns and Wassily Kandinsky.

We talked more about these artists the second week and looked at examples of their art, especially Johns' Numbers series and Kandinsky's "Squares with Concentric Circles". Jasper Johns is an American contemporary artist that uses common symbols such as letters, numbers, maps, flags and bullseyes in his art. Kandinsky was a Russian artist who was the first recognized abstract artist. The kids were able to make their own versions of a Johns or Kandinsky during the second week. (Some kids combined both styles into one artwork.) The third week we took time to finish up these two projects.

Below, you will see the project the upper grades did last week. Mrs. B-H had them doing chalk pastels of early Christian symbols. They were beautiful! Daughter L.'s is the blue, orange and green one.

Big Bad Hair Day!

Weird hair day at work, so of course, A. did it up right! Sister-I-L K. helped design it! They had fun!

YOW!

Double Dog Birthday

Sister L. is 15 today, and the little sisters have been secretly making these darling doggies to give to her. Two days of stiching while listening to taped books as the rain fell outside. She loved them so much she had to take them to our Friday home school co-op classes to show her friends. Very simple, VERY cute. M. made the brown one and W. made the black one. The free pattern can be found at http://allsorts.typepad.com/allsorts/2006/05/softie_scotty_d.html. Look for the Softie Scottie Dog.