I love this time of year. I tend to get 40 amazing ideas for decorations and traditions and I manage to pull off 2. I am glad we did this one. It went fast and the kids even helped hammer in the staples.

Lay out the boards.
Grab your fence boards and lay them out on the ground. Keep adjusting them until you have a star that looks as symmetrical as you want. Don't worry about which boards are on top and which are on bottom. The boards are pretty thin and long so they will flex for you. It didn't hurt that mine have been soaking in the rain for the last several months.

Screw the boards together.
Use two screws at each point and two screws at each cross section. Make sure that you don't have screw tips poking out the back side to get hurt on. I used screws that were exactly the length of the two boards' combined thickness. So I had to be careful.

Attach the lights.
It is easier if you move the star up onto sawhorses or a work table at this point. Start at the center of the bottom of your star with the female ends of the plugs. Tack on all three light strands at once. Stagger the starts of the strands so that your lights will be more evenly spread out. Orient the plastic staples on the boards to ideally strain the wires the least.

Let me know if you try it out in the comments! Any other exciting light displays that you've made?

I whipped up a batch of my pumpkin pudding tonight. The true story is that I didn't buy Nanaimo bars and strawberries at the grocery store this week and something was missing from my life. Then I remembered that I keep the ingredients for this recipe on hand at all times. I have a ton of things in the works and this recipe felt like something I could accomplish tonight. 

August and the first half of September really felt like a weather yo-yo. Now, we have now finally transitioned into autumn and it is wonderful. The spring and summer are really the best time to do Urban Sketching in western Washington. Now that the rain is here, I'm not sure how much I'll get out and sketch about town. 

These begonias were so gorgeous and while I like the sketch, the flowers were so much prettier in person. 

I've had this mosquito-netting-equipped-hammock for 15-20 years and it is still amazing. We took a couple weekends this summer to assess our camping gear situation. There were two tents that have reached the end of their lives. My back disagrees with sleeping on the ground and all of the air mattresses/pads can't seem to hold their air. I'm thankful that hammocks make camping a possibility again and I can retreat to the mountain to have some quiet creative time.

I wasn't intending to do this, but my eye is really drawn to the seagull on the top of the shelter. I drew it first and then later on the seagull was replaced by a crow. We really have some great birds here. I like how I drew the cars and the people in the shelter. I was acknowledging that they were there, but not giving them much attention.

This is a 7 1/2" gauge track up in Skycomish that gives free rides to the public in the non-winter months on the weekends. They have some beautiful small scale engines and because it was raining, this one was sitting still long enough for me to sketch it. There are big trains around to sketch and if the sun comes out there would be some gorgeous mountains in the background. Almost as equally entertaining is Tommy, the employee who runs the gift shop in the depot. 

I snuck out in between rain showers to sketch the little cabin that we rented out. The mountains even peeked out a little bit and they make a very sketchable dramatic background. I highly recommend Hwy 2 / Stevens Pass as a sketching getaway.

It is not always possible to get out and sketch the nifty things in our community. I did start to fill the pages of my sketchbook with cursive. It was a great way to use up some ink in pens I wanted to clean out. Much of my writing was just snippets of conversation, notes from watching Netflix, or just recordings of mundane life events. Then, because I never intend to re-read the journal pages, I paint on them.  I pull things out of my imagination and hope that the paint will do most of the work for me. It is a great way to get the paint brush onto the paper and just see what happens. 

I also spent a chunk of time crafting a planner traveler's notebook style set-up. I am loving it and I'm going to share it in a video with you soon. I think as the weather cools down more I'll be doing more of this cursive business and also working on some Winter Projects. I'm honing in on a book about Train Days and a werewolf/there was an old lady who swallowed a fly style story. Wish me luck!