Jack O'Lanterns and Frankenblankets

This Saturday, hubby decided he just had to carve a pumpkin for Halloween. This, of course, was no small undertaking .... long was the time spent drawing potential jack o'lantern faces on scrap paper; equally time-consuming was the sketching of the chosen faces on the pumpkin itself (yes... this was a Janus-faced jack o'lantern!); few were the newspaper sheets placed underneath the pumpkin as it was carved; innumerable were the 'oohs' and 'ahs' required once the carving was completed; and infinite was the gratitude and praise expected for the roasted pumpkin seeds produced in the aftermath of the great pumpkin carving. 
The pumpkin's 'good' side
For the rest of the evening, we sat around breathing the slightly acrid smell of burning pumpkin flesh - a tea candle had to be lit inside the jack o'lantern at all times for full effect, you see - and gorged ourselves on the sweets intended for the trick-or-treaters who never came! I'm not quite sure what we'll do if they come a-knocking tonight, but I'm sure we can rustle up something .... little kids love roasted pumpkin seeds, right?!

 As hubby carved, I kept well out of the way - pumpkin innards were flying pretty freely around the place - and worked on my EPP baby quilt, which is coming along very... very... very... slowly indeed. In fact, it's taken on a life of its own, morphing, appropriately enough given the day that's in it, into a Frankenblanket, of which I'm equally proud and horrified! I'm determined to see it finished, though I'm not at all confident that this'll happen before Baby H arrives, not least because it requires several more EPP flowers than I had initially anticipated. I don't even want to think about how I'm going to quilt this monster when I get the extra flowers made and the quilt top finished, but, at the very least, the need for more flowers gave me the opportunity to sift through (and photograph - finally!) the lovely charms I received in the Japanese Charm Swap a while back.  



So many beauties here, but these are a few of my favourites:

Happy little penguins, colourful Babushka dolls, and dancing mini desserts!
I'm a little bit hesitant to cut up or even use whole any of these charms in case I want them all for a future, undetermined project, but I'm sure I can spare one or two for my Frankenblanket! In the meantime, you can find me scrubbing pumpkin pulp from the floor whilst blithely plotting the jack o'lantern's imminent demise ... I see a pumpkin pie in my very near future!

 xx Tina

Comments

  1. Sarah31 October 2012 at 11:55

    Love the tale of your pumpkin. Your japanese charms are so cute - love those Matroyskas, so sweet and feminine!

    ReplyDelete

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