Halloween

When asked what she wanted to be for Halloween many months ago Katie was not sure. We headed to the store to take a look at patterns. Katie finally selected a pink fairy costume from McCalls. I purchased the pattern and materials and began construction. Katie was very adamant that she was a fairy, not a princess because she had wings and a wand. 

My Mom did primary construction on the actual costume, my brother worked on the wings and I made the wand. I almost purchased a wand but then saw one and thought "I can make that". I purchased tulle, a dowel, ribbon and a set of small flower decorations. I began by cutting strips of tulle, we sewed a seam then gathered it to make a circle. Two of these sewn and hot glued then adding the flower decoration resulted in this:

I made two of these so the want could be double sided. Next we cut the dowel and wrapped it with wide ribbon. I then tied and glued ribbon streamers to the top and attached the tulle circles.

Here is Katie with the finished product.

The costume was a lot of work but the results were worth it. She wanted pink and sparkly and that is what she got.

Pumpkins and Hubbard Squash

This very ugly squash finally was cut open.

It looked like this inside, very similar to a pumpkin or other squash.

We cut it open, removed the seeds and cooked it to make puree.

We roasted the seeds and froze the squash. It is supposed to make excellent pies, similar to pumpkin.

At the same time we cut up, pureed, and roasted the seeds from our pumpkins we grew this year. Needless to say Katie lost one of her toys.

Kevin and Katie worked on removing the seeds and cleaning them. I helped with the cooking. We used the oven and microwave this year and got quite a bit of puree. We them made pumpkin butter with a large portion of it but I will save that for another post.

End of the Garden

If you remember the garden looked something like this earlier in the year, it grew quite a bit from here.

It finally began to freeze at night after having temps in the 90's all the way into October. So then the garden looked more like this.

So on a Sunday afternoon my mom, brother and Katie joined with me in clearing the garden out. All of the tomatoes that has not yet been affected by the freeze needed to be picked.

The tomato cages had to be pulled and have the plants removed from them. Katie helped by picking up the stakes from the ground that had held the cages.

The cages are kept in the side yard, Katie helped by rolling them over.

All of the plants were moved and stacked to be put in a compost pile.

There were a lot of tomatoes both ripe and green. This area is now empty and my yard looks huge!