What have I been doing?

Thank you for asking ;)!  And, for visiting!   Well, this is always a busy time for me.  I love, love, love Fall and so I spend as much time as I can outside getting the garden in shape for winter, but also planting pansies and violas in my many pots scattered thoughout the garden.  They look so fresh and wonderful though the fall and then they mostly survive winter.  In March, I go out clean up the pots and add some fertilizer and they flourish all though Spring!  I just love them. 



I must say that I'm a sucker for black flowers, violas, tulips, iris, anything that comes in black!  There are those who think I'm crazy, or at the least, weird, but it can't be helped.  This lovely little black viola came inside the porch with me and just needed to be put in a vase with some orange marigolds.  And, then it just needed it's picture taken!  Which brings me to the other things that have been keeping me busy, which are changing my house over from Summer to Fall.  I love to decorate the house for Fall.  In October I add in Halloween fun because I love Halloween.  I don't like gory, ugly Halloween, but I love vintage Halloween and cute/pretty witches, and jack-o-lanterns, which I think are my favorites!  So, that's what I did the beginning of the month and since then I've been adding new Halloween items that I've been making.  You see, not many people who don't know me really well know that I love paper arts.  My daughter is the real paper artist in the family, but over the years I dabbled in it and lately I've become hooked.  I've always loved tags and now they are all the rage.  So, I've been making tags and shadow boxes.  I haven't take pictures of all of them yet, but I do have some pictures of a shadow box, called a Configuration by the wildly popular Tim Holtz (I'm a fan!). 

I've done a couple of  these boxes in the last year and this is my latest one.  The boring part is covering the box, but once that's done I have so much fun creating the scene, or arranging the different pieces.  My sweet husband had the idea to use little skulls for feet!  You can see them peeking out at the bottom of the picture.  We found a little mesh bag of them at Michael's and they worked perfectly!  Here are a couple close ups.





I'll be taking pictures of the tags and the other little shadow box and I'll show you what other things I've been keeping busy with. 

As for my beading and wire and metal work, I'm working on the blog hop that Therese and Christine are hosting on the 25th of October, so you'll be seeing that and maybe some other things before the blog hop.  I never know what I'm going to decide to work on!  But, going back and forth keeps things interesting, I think.

I'll be back soon with pictures of other Halloween goodness!