Early Thanksgiving

         Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday!  It marks the start to a new season, and since I've lived on my own, its a time to enjoy with my family!  This is the week that marks the beginning of all the holiday festivities!  As Thanksgiving is this Thursday, most people travel back to their hometowns by Tuesday or Wednesday to spend time with their families and have a few days to eat good food and relax a little.  I can't wait to spend the week with my own family in Concord!  

          So to kick off the holidays a little early,  we had our own traditional Thanksgiving dinner before we all left Greensboro in different directions!  We each chipped in to put it together: Vlad cooked the rosemary and sage turkey, David brought the rolls, Derek helped with the mac & cheese, Lindley and Nic made the stuffing, Eric and Emma brought gravy and cookies!  As a party of 10, and having a Christmas movie as a background, not to mention all the extra mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pasta salad and pumpkin or apple pie for dessert, our family dinner was a perfect setting to say hello to the holidays, as this season is all about realizing what you're thankful for and cherishing the family and friends dearest to you.

Autumn Berries in Blowing Rock

Autumn Berries

I love this color scheme because it touches on all my autumn favorites: the golden orange & the subtle yellow, with bursts of coral and rich reds, then finishing with just a hint of fading green.

If you're not familiar with Kuler, you should really spend a little time playing around on it. It's such an amazing tool for creating professional and personal color schemes!  For more information on Kuler go to Adobe.com or check out my previous blog post here!

But I hope all my fellow designers and crafters can use and enjoy this color scheme I'm sharing!  To get the set, go here and grab it!

You can find all of my color schemes and there posts here!

Campus Colors

          It's starting to get colder in North Carolina, but this was one of the prettiest autumns we've had in the piedmont for several years.  There was a good four weeks of color on the trees, when we usually only get two before everything turns brown, so here's one last look before they all blow away, leaving empty branches and a winter setting.  With the malls and shopping centers having already hung their wreaths, put up their Christmas trees and bedazzled their displays with red and gold, the holidays are quickly setting in!  I can already smell Thanksgiving turkey and crisp pumpkin pie!  So before all the festivities start, here's a few pictures celebrating this year's autumn season that has been so good to us!

All Hallows Eve

         Happy Halloween Everyone!  Since I'm a big girl now and have to work on weekdays (even if they are partial holidays), we celebrated halloween this weekend, so here's a bit of my holiday!  Nic and Lindley went as PopEye and Olive while I was Little Red Riding Hood (complete with wolf Yuma by my side and a basket in hand) and Vlad went as a monkey or big teddy bear if you didn't see his tail...

          Monday we carved pumpkins together, but since the weather was poor we couldn't go pick them out so we settled for grocery store pumpkins and my kitchen table instead of my porch.  But we began the evening by baking pumpkin cookies with cinnamon and nutmeg.  Spending an evening being silly and creative with my friends is the perfect kind of night for me!  After cleaning out the pumpkins and drawing our designs, the boys finished carving while Lindley and I toasted the seeds in olive oil with pumpkin pie spice.  Our finished products, though not as perfect as we might have hoped, turned out so fun and festive anyway!

The Blowing Rock

        Saturday morning we ventured to The Blowing Rock, named after a Chickasaw legend of love and honor, which had breathtaking views of the Blue Ridge Mountains and was strewn with purple and yellow wildflowers.  Spending the day surrounded by natural beauty decorated in brilliant golden hues in the crisp mountain air was the perfect way relax and take a moment to embrace the grandeur of the season.

2012 Place 4 : Blowing Rock, NC

           This weekend Lindley and I decided to have a girls weekend, celebrating the fall season and a little time away from Greensboro!  It was a timely opportunity to go to my 4th Place of the year! (( For new readers,  I made a new year's resolution in 2010 to travel to five places I'd never been before, and I've kept that resolution for the past three years.  To read about the other places I've been you can start here. ))
          For Place Four of 2012, I choose Blowing Rock, NC.  Only two hours away from Greensboro, the drive was full of amazing scenery and beautiful trees!  When we arrived, we checked in and headed  straight downtown, which was conveniently within walking distance.  We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping and buying all things apple: apple cider, carmel apples, and fresh apples of all different varieties.  My favorite was the Turley Windsap, the pastel lime and pink colored apples had a sweeter taste and were crisper than Lindley's favorite the Pink Lady.   With corn husk decorations and  baskets of pumpkins along the sidewalk, the streets of Blowing Rock, while quaint, were bursting with life and people enjoying the beautiful weather and the freshest time of year! It was the perfect escape for a girls weekend!

Posts on Day Two Next.