Happy Fall, Y'all!

This afternoon and evening, in honor of the autumnal equinox, the chicks and I had our own personal fall festival, or "festi-bull" as it's known in chick parlance, a pronunciation I hope they continue to use for at least five more years.

After a leaf-collection walk, we made leaf crowns using the instructions in Carol Petrash's Earthways, my new favorite kids' crafting book.
 

Spotted: wood fairies--

I'm a bit too tired for a tutorial, but the project is pretty easy.  You simply collect leaves, snip off the stems, and then "pin" them together end-to-end using the stems you removed.  We found we needed to poke a small hole in the leaves before inserting the stem.  Here's one crown-in-progress:

We then played with snails, whom we will miss over the winter.  Montreal has the best snails, in abundance:

Ninna built them a habitat using the leftover leaves:

We harvested what we could from the yard, which today meant a single cherry tomato, and two large handfuls of beans from our still-lush and very prolific bean teepee:

We finished the evening with a candlelight "harvest dinner," in the company of more early fall leaves and bowls of shiny chestnuts the chicks have been gathering on our walks home from school:

I hope your first day of fall was as lovely as ours!

The Junk Box: A Collection of Odds and Ends for Inspiring Creativity

Many, many years ago, when I was in college, I read an interview with Trey Anastasio (perhaps in Rolling Stone?  I don't remember anymore) in which he talked about how his mother, a writer for Sesame Street Magazine, really encouraged creativity.  He mentioned that she would give him and his sister a random assortment of things and tell them to make something out of them.  I distinctly remember thinking to myself "What a great idea; I will do this when I have kids."

Fast forward to what seems to be many lifetimes later, I have kids, and we keep what we refer to as "the junk box."  It's no longer even a box--we transferred it from a box to a large reusable shopping bag--but the name stuck.  The junk box is filled with anything you can imagine, and more.  I have been filling the junk box for about four years now (yes...it actually moved with us from California, as nuts as that may seem.)  Whenever we have some kind of smallish item that can't be recycled and/or looks interesting, we add it to the junk box. 

We do different things with the contents.  I have, like Anastasio's mother, pulled out a few random things and left them for the kids to explore and use.  Sometimes we keep something for which we have a specific plan.  And other times, we just take out the junk box and see what we can make.

A few weeks ago, we made gardens:

These were created based on some of-the-moment inspiration: we took out some of the junk, someone realized that something looked like a flower, and suddenly we were each making our own garden. In Teacher Tom style, we assembled them using a glue gun. So far I'm the only one operating said device--which is, incidentally, a dollar store-quality glue gun I got at a garage sale when I was about twenty and which is, amazingly, still going strong after all these years.

These gardens contain a really random assortment of materials, including:

*Disposable carry-out chopsticks

*Disk-shaped small plastic building toys

*Foam containers that previously held sticker sets

*Fruit/vegetable mesh

*Green vinyl from knitting needle packaging

*An old lid from a Sigg water bottle

*(unused!) Foam earplugs

*Wire from an old dollar store tiara

*Handles from mesh baby feeders

*Various kinds of styrofoam

*The lid for a food storage container we no longer have

And this is precisely why I think you should have a junk box, too.  When else would you ever think to put all of those things together?  You wouldn't.  You wouldn't put them together unless you happened to have them sitting around.  And you might make a flower garden out of clay, or paper mache, or some other such traditional art material, and those would all be great.  But forcing ourselves to look at the form of an object outside of its function and think about how else it might be used is a great intellectual exercise, and one worth encouraging in our children.

There are literally hundreds of items in our junk box, and we add more all the time.  You'd be amazed at how many little odds and ends you dispose of on a daily or weekly basis, all of which could have a second or third life as materials for art and exploration.

The Houseplant Sampler: A Simple, Free Gift

Our close friends had some remodeling done to their home last year, and in the process, they lost most of their houseplants to accidental neglect.  I had been meaning to give them some plant clippings for ages and kept forgetting, so I put together a little "Houseplant Sampler" for them a few weeks ago:
Do you propagate your plants by clipping them?  I do, all the time.  It's so very, very easy, and you can keep plants going for ages.  You can't do this with all plants, but it does work with quite a lot of them.  Some work better rooted in water, first, and some work better rooted in soil.  Click here for information on plant propagation.  I don't generally put that much thought into it though, honestly.  I just try it, and if it works, great, and if not, I compost the clipping.

I keep plant cuttings in water at all times.  I like to have a constant supply of potential new houseplants for rearranging rooms, replacing plants that die, gifting, and just generally making our house greener.  There are also many plants that you can split once they become a certain size; you take off a whole chunk, roots and all, and it's ready to be planted in soil.  I find plant propagation to be immensely fun.  We have plants that are (as I like to think of it) the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of plants we bought when we first moved here.

And if you have a houseplant that's dying or almost dead, don't throw it away or compost it.  First try to root the remaining green part.   

To make the Houseplant Sampler, I just used an old seedling container (which, by the way, I dug out of our neighbor's trash two years ago and have since used for two spring's worth of new seedlings.)  I filled it with soil and added a variety of clippings--some that had previously been rooted in water, and some cut from plants that day.  Some have not made it, but some have, and I think next time around I'll have a better sense of what to put in there.

I'm planning to use this idea for housewarming presents.  I know I would have loved it if someone had shown up at my door with a tray of baby houseplants right after I'd moved in.

Summer Highlights (More Photos than You Can Shake a Stick at)

It turns out it's really taking me some time to get into a good routine with all the changes around here.  The late summer involved squeezing in some more summertime fun, socializing, and getting ready for school.  And then chaos ensued.  Ninna started school two weeks ago and, unfortunately, it was a really unpleasant experience.  I won't go into it here, but we pulled her out mid-week last week, and as of last Friday had enrolled her in a new school about which we all feel much, much better.  I'll get to that in another post because for now, I'd like to spend a few minutes documenting our summer before we've moved too far along and it never gets done!

There was, of course, our yearly Michigan trip:

Bojey enjoyed the 12 hour drive as much as she has in years past:

This has become a bit of a joke. Each year we wonder if she's going to tolerate it any better than the last. Poor thing does not want to be restrained.

My parents set up a kiddie pool like they do every year, and, like she does every year, Ninna flashed her wide eyes and sly smile, tricking my dad into carrying out pot after pot of hot water so they could have a luxury spa experience instead of garden hose temps.  Lucky for them they have this trip because they know mama would never succumb to such requests...

The girls played duets on my parents' piano.  One day we will have one of our own so I can hear such sweetness every day:

I've accidentally created a tradition of photographing my girls every year next to the historic fountain at the Detroit Zoo, and OH MY STARS WHEN DID MY BABY GET SO BIG?!

Upon returning home, we got back into our usual routine, which is to say that Ninna dazzled me with her spontaneous craftiness--in this case, making an umbrella (from a stick and fabric) for our under-the-weather next door neighbor. Note the headband she made from the extra fabric:

And then we were off again on our yearly trip to upstate New York, beloved not only because it involves our dear friends and the green, clean outdoors, but also because it is virtually free:).

While there, we went to the county fair, where we got to do things like ride merry-go-rounds, pet goats, and see a cow jump up and unexpectedly "hug" a 4-H kid around the shoulders (yeah, it was weird...and a little scary...but the kid was fine).

We played in a brook:

And we swam in a self-filtering pool made from a dammed-up section of the same brook:

Home again meant crafting again, beginning with these flying paper bird toys.  I started to write a tutorial at one point, but I stopped, and there's no going back now. 

We made a fairy garden and were much more inspired than last year. Here it is, brand-spanking new, before we planted chia and wheat grass:

We sewed a leaf garland on the inaugural day. It only lasted until the end of the day before shriveling, but it looked so cute while it lasted:

We went to the free day at the Montreal Botanical Gardens. The kiddos listened to some kind of zen chants in the building next to the Japanese gardens, and I don't know why, but I find these photos quite funny:

Also in the Japanese gardens, I learned that I kind of love bonsai.  Look at this--it's a whole bonsai maple forest!  Can you believe it?

Can't you just imagine fairies in there? I can.


While at the Botanical Gardens, we stopped at the Insectarium (also free).  Look at this amazing rainbow of beetles:

An absolutely enormous insect, with my hand for size comparison:

Did you know that this is a thing?  It is.

Camouflage--one of my favorite tricks of nature.  Incredible.

We also did many more summer crafts, including these corn husk dolls (assembled weeks ago, photographed today) who grow creepier and more shriveled with each passing hour:

So in re-reading this post, it seems the two themes of our summer were "visit free or low-cost places" and "make stuff." And that sounds about right. We did many other things and had many enjoyable days (and, of course, plenty of unenjoyable moments as well), some of which I won't get to here, and some of which are unphotographed and will remain as fleeting bits of our subconscious.

All in all, it was a good summer, but I'm really ready for fall. I'm looking forward to getting used to our new routine with Ninna's school and doing more of things like cooking and baking, writing, and warm, wintery handwork. I'm thankful that I'm going to be working more (I have some exciting new employment opportunities.) And I'm really, truly looking forward to blogging more often. I've missed interacting with you guys (and all the wonderful ideas I get from you), sharing projects, and having a record of how we've been passing the time. And so I welcome fall. It can't come soon enough.

And what about you, dear readers? Are you looking forward to fall or hanging on to the last shreds of summer, or both? (except for my Australian readers, that is!)