Fall 2024

Today is the second day of Dia de los Muertos so I’ll start my Fall post with a picture of my mini offrenda ornaments that commemorate the lives of my parents, my youngest sister, and my oldest daughter.  I love embracing this tradition and hanging my wreath each year.

Since we put curtains up in the living room windows this year, I didn’t see how it was going to work to hang the Fall branches in them. We decided to switch things around – Fall branches in the dining room windows and Halloween trees in the living room. It turned out it was actually better to have the Halloween trees in the living room – they are more visible and less likely to get knocked over now that no one has to wedge themselves into a chair in front of them.

And it’s fun to have the branches in the dining room. A maple leaf was the perfect souvenir from our girl’s trip to the Canadian Falls this year.

It was actually a key chain, but it definitely belongs on the Fall branches.  On our last visit to World Market, I was hoping to find a fox ornament since we have a lot of owls (my oldest granddaughter’s theme) but not many foxes for my youngest granddaughter.  Since they had already started switching to Christmas and none of the Christmas foxes were right, I had almost given up hope when I found a basket containing a few Fall animals, including the perfect Fall fox!

Look at that acorn! And the plaid pants and sweater!

Everything else pretty much landed where it has been in other years, so I didn’t take a picture of the top of the china cabinet or the sideboard.

I made a new arrangement by combining two previous year’s seed pods for the end of the hall.

And I put out both the Greek myth Stitchtober pillow and the pillow I made from a quilt square my sister had pieced given to me by her daughter, my Brooklyn niece.

I put last year’s Stitchtober tarot tablecloth out as well.

Adam didn’t post a list of Stitchtober prompts this year, which was probably just as well because I was working on a secret Christmas project. (There is a hint of it somewhere in this post.)

My youngest granddaughter always buys her fortune when she sees a Zoltar machine, and I thought it might be fun to feature Zoltar on my treats this year. I did a little cutting and pasting from various sources to come up with the design, and then I tried to remember what the machine says when someone is in the vicinity.  Chocolate eyes seemed like the right choice for treats.

The day after I got the Zoltar card ornaments printed and figured out a way to attach them to the eyes so they flipped up (because of the way they got printed – don’t ask!), I laughed aloud when I came across Zoltar while reading the comics. Zoltar was the theme of Sherman’s Lagoon for several days.

Too bad I doubt the recipients of my treats read the comics every morning!