Back to Autumn

It's been a while since I put anything Autumn related on here, so back to Autumn...

Do you remember the beautiful Autumn leaf bowl on my Autumn Pinterest Board? And our failed attempt to reproduce it here?



Despite our initial failure, Venetia and I have still been hankering after an Autumn bowl. So we decided to try a different version of it. I found a cheap glass bowl for 50p in a Charity Shop and we decided to try decorating that instead.

We used 'fresh' fallen leaves and just glued them on to the inside of our bowl - it's a very shallow bowl, perhaps if it had been high and deep we might have glued them on the outside.

They took quite a lot of glue to hold them down! And these leaves were all reasonably fine leaves, I don't think our thicker oak leaves, for instance, would have worked very well.

Venetia was a bit worried about how messy the glue looked but we left it to dry - for a long time! - and it improved.

We quite liked it but we still preferred the beautiful Pinterest one! So we decided to have another go, this time with a bowl not a balloon and this time being careful with the leaves we chose.

We pressed some leaves in a book just for a day - to make them a little flatter and easier to use without drying them out completely. As per the instructions, we were using clingfilm and oil to protect the bowl so we decided we were safe using our bowl above as the base for this one too.

It was a lot better than the balloon attempt. We used an awful lot of glue, and it took several days to dry out enough to try and peel away the clingfilm.

The clingfilm was very tricky to remove and we lost a few leaves in the process that just stuck stubbornly to the clingfilm. We patched these parts up a bit with a few spare leaves gently glued on where needed, and here it is:

It does look pretty but I have to say it is really flimsy! It just about holds its shape, and I think we could put things like acorns in there, but nothing heavy or bulky around the sides. But at least we did it!

Autumn always seems to be so closely associated with falling leaves and these colours, but I've been struck by other sides to Autumn in the past few days. As I came home yesterday morning and walked past a large ivy bush I was hit by an unbelievably loud buzzing noise all around me. The bush was literally swarming with bees, they seemed to be frantically dashing from flower to flower to stock up on supplies before the cold weather arrives and they're holed up for the Winter. Or perhaps it's not last minute panic pollen buying, but more that the ivy flowers are one of the last flowers available to them and they were just all concentrated in the one area for a change. I wish I could have captured the noise for you, especially as my attempts to take a photo were fairly pathetic - they just wouldn't stay still for me! But here are two of them at least.

And I've got two beautiful photos to end with as well. Beautiful images of Autumn that again don't tie in with the stereotypical falling leaves. We're lucky enough to live quite close to some amazing moorland here, and the moors in Autumn are just gorgeous, and often surprisingly colourful. My friend Martin, the expert photographer (remember his great photo of his lovely wife Michele's PE bag here?), took these photos and kindly shared them with me. Thank you, Martin!




A stunning view of moor meeting coast.

 It makes me want to go for a brisk Autumn walk right there - maybe at the weekend! Remember if you have any favourite Autumn recipes, or have made any Autumn crafty goodies, I'd love to see them. You can add them to the 'Linky' thing below. I got lots of damsons today (a house up the road obviously has a glut of them and was selling big bags of them cheaply by the roadside), I don't think I've ever had them before so if anyone has any great suggestions for how to use them that would be wonderful. I know Damson Jam is supposed to be delicious but do other damson makes work - damson crumble perhaps? Any suggestions or advice would be very gratefully received - ideally fairly speedy suggestions since they're proving quite popular just eaten raw!

Back tomorrow, Sally.