In search of The Great Pumpkin...

Thanksgiving weekend was full of family and food!
My Aunt hosted a huge family reunion and I was able to connect
with many loved ones I don't get to see often enough.
I stayed the night out at my folks place with my awesome nieces
and we took advantage of the dry-ish weather to visit the local pumpkin patch...

What can I say about a field full of these plump orange orbs?

Always a favourite to photograph...

Brother Dan, affectionately known as BroGorman, thought so too...

Seems to be a quintessential autumn thing to do...

Wandering up and down the rows, looking for just the right one...

Exploring all the angles...

And then...Yes! This one...definitely this is the one she wanted!

We took a little drive up to the top of the hill and found this pretty boy...

Hello beautiful!

Oh and we found the best little pigpen too...

This big boy was separated from the gals...

I supposed he was only there for his...ahem...services...

Even though he had a smirk on his face, I felt a bit lonely for him...

Ah yes, the girl from the country who comes to visit her folks and roams around looking 

at other peoples country scenes...

It's different out here though. Flat farm lands...big open spaces...my home is amongst the woods

and sometimes I long for the views of the valleys and fields...

So a lovely weekend with family...so many of the babies I once knew all grown

up with babies of their own. 

That's the way though isn't it? 

Life marches on in wondrous ways.

Cherish these times.

The water pearl spinners...

The rain today was ‘soft’. That's what the Irish say.

The Scottish may call it ‘smirr’, a gentle rain or maybe ‘harr’, a mist from the sea…

any way you put it the moisture left a silver coating on any spider web

otherwise invisible the day before...

This day showed off delicate pearls strung together along silken wires...

...a tightrope balancing act designed by eight legged engineers. A bridge builders dream...

The webs would billow slightly on the softest breeze and still they stayed in tact…

If not, tomorrow there’ll be another. Woven through the night, strung between any two anchors that serve the spider well.

A place of silent capture, of hours of patient waiting, anticipating another meal.

And all I can do is marvel in my love of the design…

...my thrill to see these webs highlighted by a simple rain. 

A thing I didn’t see the day before. A thing I walked into clumsily only last week…

Sometimes...

Sometimes you just need a visit to the seaside for inspiration...

sound inspires thought

light inspires  an open heart

clouds always inspire, no matter what

 A big knot of drying kelp inspires drawing

 or perhaps basket weaving

 slow photography movement

 chasing light once again

 ragged, rugged October late afternoon light

 Sitka bark inspires colour ideas

 texture

 pattern

 It's all there for the taking

The Find...

So I've had these lovely, antique wood spindles around for ages.

Technically called 'quills', they were used in the woolen mill/textile 

industry in big factories to organize threads on looms.

I've had a few inspirations on what to do with them

and then yesterday one of those ideas finally came to fruition...

Introducing... "The Find"

 These happy crows are making a big noise of today's find...

 I had these scissors in my button stash that I think were intended for scrap booking.

I believe they came from a little pack of buttons and such from the thrift shop.
I've aged them a bit to look like they've been around the cutting floor for eons...

So if any of you know anything about the Corvid family of birds,

you'll know that they love shiny things...hence the excitement!
Crows and Ravens are some of the most enduring birds.
Don't be fooled by their bad reputation.
Intelligent, loving, resourceful, dedicated family members and comical.
I'm not sure why they've been the subject of doom and gloom and bad omens
but in my books they are a joy to watch.
Definitely the bird of October aren't they?!

 I notched of the bottom edge of the spindle so it wouldn't roll around anymore.
The beaks are made from some outer teeth casings from a jaw I found on the beach...

...I painted them black and meticulously pieced them together before adhering 

them into the heads of the crows...

They worked into perfect crow beaks...

In photography, I find the two hardest colours to capture are red and black.
In practicing with different shutter speeds, apertures, etc, and some fine tuning
in the editing department I was able to get some fairly decent shots though.
So off they will fly...to a house on the river road...
...to a maker of lovely textiles and a lover of crows.