Here are some pictures of the wedding and bridesmaid dresses I made in the fall.

Sometimes the drab color palette of the outdoors this time of year gets me down. Just in case you’re the same, I wanted to share some pictures I took of flowers in my yard over the past year. Most of the flowers I planted I chose because they attract birds or butterflies. I’m a nature lover and have a passion for amateur photography, so these pictures warm my heart even when it is cold outside. Ignore the fact that it neared seventy degrees in Georgia today!

Here are some of the things we’ve been up to recently.

This was the inside of the pumpkin when I cut it in half. I love the way you can see three distinct sections.

This is the pumpkin after I baked it.

The pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting were wonderful as usual.

This was my first experience with a spaghetti squash. I will not be giving up pasta for squash, but it was really neat to see how it got its name. It was tasty with our Chicken Parmesan, too.

My wonderful husband carves our pumpkin every year. I think he does a great job!

I made a batch of pepper jelly with jalepeños from our garden.

We dressed up to visit grandparents. I made my costume and the pirate costumes. Colin was Thomas a few years ago and passed the costume down to Eamon since he loves trains.

Oh yeah…and I turned 30!!! Here is the birthday card I got from my husband…a “mock” newspaper/tabloid article. It even includes my name misspelled once, which is a necessity to be real, as anyone in the printing industry knows!

Well, after six weeks and a lot of work, I finished sewing a wedding dress and two bridesmaid dresses. I don’t have pictures from the wedding yet, but I will post them as soon as I can.

What a mess! In order to cut out the wedding dress, I had to completely rearrange the kitchen, push my kitchen table and sewing table together, then drape the rest of the satin in a chair.

For the first fitting, I made a muslin bodice to make sure it was the right size. For the second fitting, I pinned the bodice to the skirt lining.

It took a long time for me to decide how I wanted to arrange the embellishments. I don’t know how many times I moved them around before I figured out just how I wanted them.

These are pictures of the dress before I embellished it.

I took these pictures before the dress was completely finished and I still had some of the embellishments pinned on.

This is with the train pinned up the way it would be bustled for the reception. She planned to tie the sash in a bow to keep it out of the way.

These are pictures of the finished wedding dress.

This is the only picture I have of one of the bridesmaids in her dress. After the picture was made, I still had to hem the bottom and steam it to get all the wrinkles out.

On Saturday, we got up and decided to drive to a nearby park. It turned out to be even better than we could have imagined. We set out to identify trees using a field guide I had checked out from the library. I know the names of a lot of trees, but I wanted to try to name some I didn’t already know. As it turns out, the book I had was near impossible to use, so we gave up and I just told the boys the trees I recognized already. I guess I’ll be asking for a new field guide for my birthday or Christmas.

The leaves were absolutely gorgeous and when they reflected on the lake, it was twice as nice. Notice how the leaves blur together like a watercolor painting where the water is choppy and look like a perfect mirror image when it is still.

When we started out, there was a chill in the air, but as the day grew older, it warmed to a nice warm temperature…all in all, perfect weather for a day outside.

One of the boys noticed a furry little caterpillar crawling in the grass beside the trail and I took some pictures of it. I hope I identified it correctly. Using the bug guide, I picked the closest thing I could find.