Cabin capers...

A day with Gramma at the cabin! All it took was mentioning there would be an art project (and treats). Having the two youngest punks all to myself is always a time to kick back and become "childlike". As we sneak up on Halloween, that could involve some paper-and-scissors time. Black paper is the prize for the day. A picture from the October Good HouseKeeping gave us the idea for a porch scene, involving bats and pumpkins.


First, we had to find some good limbs. Bundled up in coats, hats, scarves and gloves - which only took about 20 minutes of mixing and matching from the bag and basket - off we went for a walk.


The red osier dogwood is a good choice for decorative projects, with bright red limbs and colorful fall leaves. You pay big bucks for it at a florist. We just tramp across the field and cut it.


The dogwood grows in dampish ground, with cattails and other bog-type plants. The cattails were checked out for ripeness - they weren't fluffy enough for an all-out cattail war yet, but we gave it a good try (memories of a fall trip to Malheur Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon).


We found some purple asters, to put in the accumulating bouquet on the counter, along with some last straggly Queen Anne's Lace. The tall weeds and grass seed heads were inspected for interest - Chef J found a gall on a stem of Golden Rod, which he recognized from our outings at Woodland Dunes as a Peacock Fly larva "bug house".


An hour later, we returned to the cabin to document our loot, and get started on the bats.

Jetta appeared out of nowhere, a typical cat-like talent, to supervise all things dealing with Halloween.

"And I can look REEEEAL spooky, too!"

The decorating was simple, attractive, and fun. We had already harvested our six garden pumpkins, and Max and Chef J had enjoyed an hour with me at the Pumpkin Patch down the road a bit. So we had plenty of Halloween color to work with. Throw in a few bats, and it's instant spooky!

Nobody said bats had to be black....that's where imagination comes in, which we encourage at tall times with the punks. They always come through - see the "I love you" bat?

Just to make sure visitors get the point that this is a HALLOWEEN display...

we enlisted some of the skulls and bones from the clean-up during our very first summer at the farm. That's another story.

Just to give you an idea of what we found...the vultures still circle and fly over at regular intervals, looking for what vultures do best. Eat dead stuff. For them to still be doing this after three years of cleaned up land, you know they had a LONG time to build up a memory...that's a lot of skeletons, folks. The place was apparently a local dump for dead animals. Truely the stuff of Halloween.

So far, all the skeletons have been four-legged.