Fall fun.

I know...it doesn't get much nerdier than this. I carved Cary Grant into a pumpkin.

 

 

This isn't as completely random as it sounds- let me explain my thought process. :)

 

I had a few things I wanted to do this fall, and one of them was to carve a pumpkin. I think I might have done this once as a kid...I have vague memories of it. But I wanted to do it again this year. Then I saw this contest, and I figured I might as well do something a little unusual and enter it in the contest since I was going to carve one anyway.

 

Halloween makes me think of creepy Hitchcock films. I thought about carving his face, but that was way too complicated. I started thinking about some of my favorite Hitchcock films. Like North by Northwest (I know it's not exactly one of his scarier movies, but it's still really good). And you know how NbN has that famous scene where poor Cary Grant gets shot at, crop dusted, practically ran over, and nearly exploded, all while looking extremely dapper in a suit? Good grief, if anyone deserves to have his likeness carved into a pumpkin, it's him. :)

 

And that's how the Cary Grant pumpkin came about.

Carving the pumpkin was fun, and less messy than I expected it to be. Trying to get pictures of it was the interesting part, though. Imagine me walking around the yard at dark, toting a surprisingly heavy pumpkin (with two unlit candles inside), my camera, and one of those things you light a grill with. I'm glad I got the pictures that night, though. Because now, a couple of days later, those thin sections between the airplane wings are getting sadly droopy.

By the way, the candles inside that pumpkin were these beeswax candles me and my mom made. I saw this tutorial a while back, and being smitten with anything even remotely yellow-ish, decided to give it a try. Besides, candles just seem perfect for fall, right? {My dad is a beekeeper but didn't have any wax available yet, so we got some from a bee-ish supply store. We used three pounds and came out with about seven candles.}

The candles turned out really pretty, though they don't have much smell (they smell a bit like honey after they've been lit for about an hour). Also, they made a huge mess. It was our first time making candles, but we learned a lot. :) Like, most importantly, cover the kitchen counter with newspaper or something. We're still scraping off wax. And if you heat the wax in an old crock pot type thing, it heats it evenly and safely but also takes forever. And it takes a lot of coordination to pour out melted wax.

And one last fall-ish thing we've done lately...we used apples we bought in the mountains to make cider. We spent a fun evening with my cousin and his wife and their children, using this very old cider mill/press that has been passed down through the family. :) It was a very interesting (and sticky) experience! Apparently I was really young the last time we did this (I don't remember it).

{My cousin's wife Jennifer took these two photos. She joked about me blogging about the cider pressing, so I really hope she doesn't mind that I used a couple of her pictures. :)}

What festive fall things have you done lately?

Until next time,