Friday Pinning

We stocked up on a few more glow-in-the-dark skeletons yesterday and will decorate our front yard on the weekend for Hallowe'en. Some families have already started and I'm looking forward to taking more pictures this year. Poppet still wants to go for a cuter Hallowe'en than a scary one but that's fine.
Meanwhile here are some ideas from Pinterest...

All images are from my Pinterest board over here. Do you trick or treat?
We love it!

Comets and Such...

So, last night I was lying on Poppet's bed at sunset whilst she read to me from the final Narnia book.
As I stared out the window, pondering centaurs and unicorns, I watched a bright orange shape make it's way through the sky. It took about a minute to get from one side of her window to the other. At the time, I just watched it and didn't think to alert Poppet to it's presence nor call her Father from downstairs to look out the window.
And then I forgot about it, until I was looking out her window again tonight.
Turns out that I saw a Draconid Meteor. Who knew?! I've never seen anything in the night sky apart from the regular stars and airplanes. I've been reading up on this phenomena, and the Draconids have been described as 'languid' over the past few years. Very apt, and I felt sort of languid as it passed.
My Draconid looked a little like this...

Top left-hand corner. Image via here

 

 

It was a beautiful thing. I'm a very lucky girl and whilst I don't see it as a sign (not the superstitious type) it certainly made me smile.
Next stop Aurora Borealis please...

Happy Thanksgiving

We've had a lovely long weekend. It's Thanksgiving in Canada and it's suddenly so cold. Today we had a top of 9 degrees. Awesome!
Most of the weekend was spent making pastry for various pies (we received an invite to our first Thanksgiving dinner for Sunday and had apple and vegetable pies to make for our contribution) but we also got out and played some soccer in the park. Poppet is actually pretty good at kicking that ball, must be her Mancunian roots. She certainly doesn't get it from me! The tree climbing is where my genes come in. There's a couple of nice climbing trees at the park, but it was so windy and cold that we had to give up and return home. As the weather cools down we have a nice routine when we get indoors. Poppet has a warm bath, I throw her pyjamas into the dryer and whip up some hot chocolate. It's so good. Summer will never trump that in my book. We did an amazing day-trip today so see the fall colour, but I'll do a separate post to do those photos justice. I even got some work done!
Here's our Thanksgiving weekend in a nutshell...

Some Rudolfs on their way.

Lovely colour!

Squealing and kicking go hand in hand, apparently.

Nice goalie action

Success.

CN Tower in the distance.

Squir'll.

Peeling practise.

Pastry and pyjamas.

Awesome apple pie!

A welcome visitor.

And so, we are thankful to be in Canada. A year on, we are still completely in love with the place and excited about exploring it further. Ice skating lessons have been booked for November and the park ranger told us today she had wet snow falling this weekend. Only an hour out of the city! Fingers crossed for more white stuff this year. We just didn't get enough last season.
Back to school tomorrow and I'll be hard at work on that Xmas stock. Keep an eye out at the end of the month, there'll be some lovely things up for grabs.
Hope you've had a lovely weekend, whatever you've been up to...

Friday Pin-Ups

We're working on a new Pin-Ups board. The latest theme is "Handmade Goodness" and we thought we'd collect ideas for handmade giving in the lead-up to Christmas.
So, here's a few of my favourites....

image via here

image via here

image via here

image via here

All of these pins are brought to you from the lovely Tam from Baby Bites in New Zealand. You can see what she's up to over here.

It's Thanksgiving this weekend, which means turkey and pumpkin pie and a long weekend. Yippee!
I'm baking an apple pie and we're hoping to squeeze in a drive to look at the fall colour.
See you on the other side.

Smiling

Oops, sorry it's been a while. We all got a bit sickly last week with a head cold and lay low.
Apart from seeing Louis CK's live show, I would never wear mascara to one of his shows. Talk about tears of laughter!
Otherwise, the mornings have been a little better. ABBA has helped put a smile on our dials and things are generally better. I made some nice food, Poppet wrote me a lovely blackboard message, I bought myself something frivolous and managed to get quite a decent amount of work done. We have a mouse in the house, so have started 'borrowing' the basement cats (child goes out into the street and drags them upstairs to our place by force) and it's nice having some pets around. Even if it's only part-time. I've even managed some crochet, though I should sew some ends in before it gets any bigger. Plus it's getting colder. Happy dance indeed!
Fall has arrived, leaves are turning (and falling) and the flowers are giving us one final show. Just wish the wasps would bugger off!
Here are some pics from last week....

Sigh. Colour.

On the deck.

Too much sleeping, too little mouse catching.

Mum, I love you so so much! Because of that I will give you 2 gold STARS!!!

Purchased for me! From super-talented Cara Carmina

Butterfly Poppet just completed for a special client.

I loved stitching her wings!

Christmas Poppet Decorations

And the result of all of my hard work and podcast listening is that I'll be stocking my Etsy store with lots of Christmas goodies at the end of October. This will be your one and only chance to grab something Christmas-y from me before the end of the year. After that I'm going to accept a limited amount of custom orders. You heard that right!
I'm making some decorations for your Christmas trees this year, what do you think of them so far?
Back to the grindstone now...