It's October now, time to get ready for winter!?

It's been beautiful and sunny for a while. Cold nights and mornings, leaves starting to turn. Definitely fall and not summer, but warm during the day. Very nice, indeed. And time to think of the coming seasons.

I have recently discovered Pinterest, which is a very big time-sink and it also shows me all sorts of things I wouldn't otherwise trouble myself with, like Halloween wreaths! Now, a Halloween wreath seems like a very silly thing to me, but a wreath for the door around Christmastime is a fine thing, and anything other than the cedar circles from the grocery store is even better.

First, you get a ring -- remember the lampshade project? I have a bucketload of lampshade rings that just need old glue and guck taken off, and then they are perfect for this.

Then you need some tulle, and I just happened to have a wee bit of white in a bag, so we cut that up and looped it on. It only covered about a third of the ring, so we had to do some thinking. I had some black, which was not quite the right texture and we weren't sure we wanted the Cruella DeVille look, either. So, new plan.

I happened to be out near Value Village, which was full of stuff for Halloween -- the wedding dresses with stains on the front which are only good for costumes, the out-of-season things they'd like to get rid of, the ... costumes and weird exotic funny things! I was in a rush, but ran through one rack and came up with a few options, ultimately deciding on a toddler-sized dress with three layers of tulle, in white and icy blue!

(At several points in the making of this, I said, "Hmm, I should have taken a picture for the blog." I don't even have a picture of the dress before we cut it up.)

knotted on the ring

The clear white is the original stuff we had, and the yellowed white is from the dress. Under the layer of white there were two layers of blue. It was a very cute size 2T dress with a halter top, an elastic waist in the back and a full skirt to go over the diapers! And perhaps it was even floor-length, though my understanding of what a two-year-old looks like is a bit misty these days.

Maybe we will attach more lace, and a big snowflake?

The Chia Pet is delighted.

We need to add a few details, find a ribbon to hang it, and sit back and wait for the snow, I guess!

(This took much longer to compose than it should have, because I am using Blogger's new template thingy and to get the pictures in the right places and not crazy looking I had to keep going back and forth to tweak the HTML. I think they wanted to make it easier, but they didn't!)