Buddies

My littlest sister and I may be 11 years apart, but we are kindred spirits and cut from the same wacky mold. We share a love for art and realness and have the same ridiculous machine-gun giggle, which means we crack ourselves up all the time. We usually end up spending our time together teaching one another different skills. Last year, my sister taught me the basics of long boarding. This year, since she has a photography class, I get to teach her the basics of a DSLR.

To practice, we took a drive during the golden hour to capture some late summer treasures:

I love that I have someone special that can do silly impressions with me and inspire me regularly. That's what kindred spirits do, inspire (and do silly impressions). Do you have a kindred spirit?

Baby Bumpkins

We have a new little wonder in our family, a chubby little nephew:

He's such a snuggle bug and I love his Alfred Hitchcock profile. (Silly baby!)

Startling Color

We took a ride on my daddy-o's RZR and enjoyed incredible autumn colors:

Every time autumn rolls around, I'm reminded of what an incredible season it is. It's heavy with nostalgia and the colors swallow me up every time. I could swim in fall colors and never feel like I need to resurface for air. Love it! Is anyone else excited for the new season?

Pretties

For our activity with the youth last week, we made some fun necklaces:

These were as easy as trimming out scrapbook paper, gluing the paper to a glass tile, then adding a chain and some trinkets. Fun, right?

Shed No Tears

So, we've been up to our regular autumn shenanigans harvesting and preserving our harvests. I experimented with potatoes in my garden and then experimented with onions in my preserving. We're just all about experimenting, it turns out.

I prefer using dehydrated onions in my cooking but they can be super pricey. I go through them so quickly that it gets pretty expensive. Well, this year, enough was enough, so I planted more onions than usual intending to dry them, which was a gamble because I've never tried it before.

Well, my friends, my gamble paid off. It was a big success, and I'll be doing this from now on:

Do you want to hear my trick for not crying while dicing dozens of onions? I wore Kirk's swimming goggles, and they worked great. (Sorry, no pictures to share of that memorable moment!) Have you tried anything new lately and gotten successful results?

Around Here

It's been a while since the last post but that doesn't mean things have slowed down around here. Spending time harvesting our garden, planting some end-of-season things (in hopes of a better crop than we got in the spring), and getting the rest of our garden and yard happy for autumn has taken a lot of our hours of late:

I experimented this year by planting some potatoes from our pantry to see if they would grow as well as seed potatoes. I was happily surprised that I actually got results but don't think I'll try it again for several reasons. It was worth a shot, though, and now I'm glad I know...the curiosity probably would have killed me.

Discus

Here's another drawing I've been working on:

It's not my favorite figure drawing I've done, but sometimes when it comes to drawing, I get to count some sketches as practices. That way, I can chalk it all up under 'progression.' Thanks skinny little discus man, for letting me practice on you so that I can do much much better on the next one. (And I'm sorry your head is so big and poofy.)

Are you doing anything that you're counting as a practice lately?