Preparations

Wow. Today is November 10th, and I have barely just begun telling you about all of the makings of October! Prepare for an onslaught of creativity here because I have been making like crazy to get ready for the North Shore Bazaar (which was kinda my first show, even though it was my 3rd. Does that make sense?). So here is the past month in pictures, documenting all of my preparations:

Jason and I made another 2 batches of apple butter. We actually picked the apples ourselves this time around and had an excellent time doing it. We even made some new chicken friends.We used Macintosh apples, which didn't change the taste or texture too much from our Gravenstein batch, but their pulp was a beautiful pinkish color that I forgot to take a picture of, but here are the finished 24 jars!

I spun some of the softest (and consequently most difficult to spin) wool I've ever encountered. This wasn't ready for my show cause I still need to ply it. Unfortunately, the tension on my spinning wheel has been off, and I haven't been able to fix it. So that little project is on hold until I can get my wheel to my mom to bale me out of trouble. (Sorry no picture. It looks like yarn.)

The rest of October and the first week of November were spent felting like a crazy person!! I was originally invited to do the North Shore Bazaar because one of the professors who was organizing it saw Charlie and Amadeus in my office. So I felt like I should have some felted products to sell at the show.

So I made three more owls:Henry, Horacio, and Bernie (respectively)

I felted 9 nine pumpkins, and Jason made another 12!!

And I felted 73 acorns. Yup. 73.

My mom and I collected acorn tops on a little excursion to Old Sturbridge Village back on October 23rd. I met her down there and we spent a few hours gathering inspiration and acorn tops before driving up to Maine together for my church's women's retreat. We looked around the grounds of the retreat center and didn't find a single acorn until we took a little walk along the beach and found 2 acorns that had washed up on the shore just for us. How cool is that? We also gathered a fair amount of rose-hips that my mom made into rose-hip jelly. Again, how cool is that?

After all of the rummaging and scouring we did to find the acorn tops buried under the leaves at Sturbridge and providentially sent to us across the ocean, I found a huge crop of gigantic acorn tops right next to my church. Go figure. So I set out needle felting acorn bottoms in all sorts of fall colors to fit into the tops.

I made single acorns that can be displayed in little groupings,

pair acorns that can be ornaments, napkin rings, or a lovely addition to gift wrap,

and acorns on stem wire that can be added to wreathes and floral arrangements.All so lovely and fall-ish.

And after all that, I was satisfied that I had enough inventory for my own table at the North Shore Bazaar, which you will finally get to hear about in my next post. Get excited. :o)