October's Welcome Here

There are quite a lot of things that I love about October. I do live in Delaware so the colors can definitely be enough for me to be in heaven most days!

The 10 degree outside temperature drop is definitely a bonus this year with all the heat we had this summer!

October, for our family, always starts with Conference Weekend. The thought of being able to sit on my couch in yoga pants, a fire blazing, and plenty of snacks and watch church on TV most of the weekend is simply glorious! This years Conference was no different than all the others we've watched, there was a message for each of us that we needed to hear without even realizing it. There were moments of happy tears, and moment of reflective tears for me (always more tears when there's a bun in the oven).

Saturday morning before Conference, I took the kids over to my oldest son's elementary school for their Fall Festival. This is something that the school has been pushing pretty much since the school year started. I have to say, I was rather disappointed. I felt like it was a drive-by yard sale, you know the one that you see fliers for everywhere and even see in the paper then you get there and it isn't even worth getting out of the car... yea it was a lot like that. They did have a moon bounce, so the kids could've cared less about everything else (or the lack there of).

I did get a few good pictures tough.

Dancing, she would NOT go on the moon bounce.

This weekend I also got lots done in the kitchen, which felt so great! I feel like I got my umpf back, finally!! I baked 6 loaves of pumpkin swirl bread, ohh the house smelled so good. Of course, I gave away 5 of them (I don't need to gain that much weight before the holidays...). And I canned about 5 pounds of dried beans. I know, dried beans store for-e-ver, but I find I hardly ever ever use them when they're dried. If I'm making a huge batch of something then I might use a pound here or there, but I like to can them (it's super easy) and I use them up that way for sure. I found the 'recipe,' or instructions really, that I use online at a neat site called The Recipe Link, they have a whole section on canning & preserving. It's got tons and tons of stuff! I'm planning to do another batch of beans this week and hopefully go get my mass of apples to do applesauce too.

Clearly I need to work on taking photos indoors!

For some reason I woke up pretty early both days last weekend. So, Saturday became baking day and Sunday morning I started quilting the Pink n Green Quilt I'm working on for my Mom.

I was originally going to do straight-line quilting for two reasons: 1- it's much faster than any other type I do, and 2- I thought it would look really nice to echo the white squares that the corners of the snowball blocks made. Didn't like it. So, I'm going to stipple it, avoiding the white square all-together since only some of them were trimmed so there is 6 layers of fabric in their intersections (yikes).

I quite like how it looks, and of course my photos are horrible because my lighting in the basement is lousy (to put it nicely). I do have lights that focus on my sewing area, but that's all and it's just no good for photos.

(This one shows the colors more true)

(And this one shows the quilting better)

Either way, it felt good to get started on quilting this monster. Honestly, I was avoiding it for a few weeks... I know, I know, I need to get cracking on holiday gifts. The thought of quilting another king just wasn't appealing... can you blame me?