Green Crafting: Autumn with My Mind's Eye

Hello! Today I want to show you the page that I created for the current My Mind's Eye sketch challenge. Besides the requirement to use the monthly sketch, this challenge had an additional requirement to use the color brown. Sounds to me like the perfect recipe for another autumn page! I created a layout called "Bag Art," and you can see it in the photo below.

Supplies: patterned paper (all from My Mind's Eye), die cuts (My Mind's Eye), stickers (My Mind's Eye), brown ink (Versa Color), pens (Zig by EK Success), thread (DMC).

To fulfill the contest requirements, I used three different brown patterned papers. The background paper is from the "Lost and Found 2" collection, the scalloped circular paper is from the "Stella and Rose" collection, and the fussy-cut stems are from the "Fine and Dandy" collection. Hmmm, apparently I like collections whose names have the format "______ and _______"! I also inked the edges of all my page elements with brown ink. Here are a few detail shots (below).

The journaling reads: "We made these paper pumpkins at the Gibbs Family Halloween party."

The pumpkins themselves are interesting. They're made from ordinary paper lunch bags stuffed with shredded office paper--a great way to recycle old papers! The faces are drawn in Sharpie, and the tops are wrapped with green florist tape and tied off with straw from the Gibbs farm.

I love the Gibbs Farm, a historic site in the Saint Paul area. It's a restored farm from pioneer times (think Little House on the Prairie), and it also gives equal weight to the lives of American Indians in Minnesota (an area where the Little House series falls short). As the journaling on my layout implies, my family recently attended a Halloween party at the Gibbs farm. It's the same farm that hosted the apple party in September, which I wrote about in my "Apple Days" post. You can see how much the autumn landscape has changed in Minnesota over the course of just one month. Here (below) is a photo of the Gibbs schoolhouse on the day of the apple party.

And here (below) is a photo of the same schoolhouse on the day of the Halloween party. Pretty drab, huh? Still, it could be worse. Twenty years ago Minnesota experienced a blizzard of epic proportions on Halloween. It was so bad, we actually ended up celebrating Halloween a week late. That means that twenty years ago today--November 7, 1991--I was at a Halloween party.

That Halloween party will always be memorable to me, and not just because of the weather. I was in high school at the time, and my family was hosting an exchange student from Siberia. (The blizzard did not faze her!) I had the pleasure of introducing her to the American custom of Halloween parties. Here we are (photos below), all dressed up in our costumes. I'm the hippie, and my exchange partner is the princess. (Please excuse the poor quality of the photos...what can I say, cameras were different in 1991.) Even twenty years later, I still feel so lucky and blessed to have had the wonderful experience of participating in this exchange program and meeting so many Russian people, with whom I am still friends to this day. The autumn of 1991 was the year when the Scorpions song "Winds of Change" was so popular on the radio, and I got to experience those "winds of change" first-hand.