pumpkins and prints

Well hello there!  

I hope your Halloween was as lovely as ours.  We made a last-minute, very simple, beautiful, stay-at-home Halloween.  

As it usually happens with me and Halloween, I convince myself that I'm not up for it at all.  And then, at the last minute, I decide I must do something!  So on Halloween morning, the kiddo and I were walking out the door to his playgroup (more on his playgroup in a future post), and I decided he needed some sort of costume.  Luckily my second-mama, Sue, had knitted him this beautiful pumpkin hat last year, and it still just fit.  

 He was quite taken with it, as I was.

On the way home from playgroup I made another last minute decision to carve Jack-o-lanterns,  so off to the store we went to buy two cute little pumpkins.  (I heard somewhere that the little ones are the best for pumpkin pie making.  hopefully more to follow on that).  I was very skeptical about how two-year-old's and pumpkin carving would mix.  I needn't have worried.  He had a blast.

 (His nose got scraped in the morning when he fell down in the driveway.  Not from carving pumpkins.    :-)  He scooped.  The adults carved).

 Note:  Scooping is better savored in the nude.  His idea.

I'll spare you the gory details, but Halloween was definitely worth it!  What spooky or sacred,  (In the past I have set up little alters for my beloved dead, and cooked some of their favorite foods.  I love that too) traditions does your family have?  Daddy made the happy, goofy one.  Mommy made the scary one.  Rather telling I think.

In other news..... after a five years hiatus, I have gingerly returned to printing-making.  I don't have access to a printing press these days, so I decided to do some linoleum block cuts, which can be worked on leisurely, and printed out by hand.  I won't even try to provide any kind of tutorial, as I stumbled along quite a bit.  And I wont pretend that I did anything even close to a professional job, or that the end result is something that I'm satisfied with, but the experience was very satisfying, and it felt great to be making pictures again.

 Odysseus's dream, I'm calling it.  I just listened to an audio book version of The Odyssey, by Homer, read by the wonderful Sir Ian McKellen.  So good, so rich.  I highly recommend it.

This one is just a simple pattern I'm trying to evolve.

I did the whole process while at home with the kiddo, and surprisingly it was not disastrous.  Only a tad messy.  I kept him out of the ink by setting him up with some watercolors.  Seemed to do the trick.  At least for now.

What kinds of projects occupy your hands and hearts this season?