it's the cat's meow at ragtime seance!

I have had the privilege of getting to know the lovely Ms. Mathyld of Under the Pyramids these past couple of years. This year, I have begun to know another, the beautiful Ms. Drucilla Pettibone. These very talented, crafty and extremely affable have begun a new project: Ragtime Seance! It's part blog, part e-course, part secret club and all other sorts of awesomeness!

To celebrate beginning their new venture, they are hosting a giveaway where two people will win! I am hopeless at explaining things really well so I urge you to go to their link, be a part of the giveaway and look around as well. The blog looks fantastic and what they have set up is so great. I really am very happy and proud and wish all the best to these two!

back at tanaka farms!

A couple of weeks ago Nat and I visited Tanaka Farms again thanks to a good friend. Unlike our last visit, this time we had the tractor tour around the farm. During the tour, we learned more about the farm itself and the things they grow. It was a lot of fun, especially when we got to sample some of the goods! Carrots, corn, tomatoes, green beans, saticoy, watermelon and yellow watermelon! We stopped at the watermelon crops where Nat was able to pick out her very own melon to bring home too. After the tour was over, it was straight to the farmer's market to bring some more goodies back home with us...
 

yetis and little things wrapped in twine

Summer has been crazier than I anticipated. I have so many more photos to share and I am trying to catch up with everything. Today I will actually share what we did today (as opposed to waiting a whole week or so). Natalie has not forgotten about The Yeti Club and is eager to begin it again. We did a few yeti portraits using good old fashioned chalk on black paper. I would love to put these up in rustic looking white frames!

Here is my mister yeti with Natalie's help with the face

Her family of yetis and a solo portrait as well.

Today was also a sweet mail day as I received a little package from my dear friend Helena. She sent me samples of her wonderful natural perfumes including three big sizes of Mandragora (for our Nocturne Flora line), Nyctanthous and Midwinter. It is really hard deciding which are my favorites. They really are distinct and separate from each other but I will say she hit the mark with sending me these three biggies, love!!

I love surprises wrapped in brown paper and twine.

Mandragora, instantly a favorite...

Hopefully within the next day or so, I will share photos from our visit to Tanaka Farms yesterday. I  also have a few sketches I've done throughout the month I liked to share as well. Summer has been busy, but I am glad to have revamped the blog (again) and the littlebighead website. I truly am happy with the result now, and I hope you like it too. 

Creatures of the Night

Thanks to emails from LocalHarvest.Org, we found out about and attended Creatures of the Night at the Fullerton Arboretum. Still daylight at 7:30p we headed out with a tic-tac-toe paper assignment with various things to check out. Some of the things to see on our assignment were looking into the palm fronds for owls, listening for frogs and crickets at the pond, looking for possom and/or skunk tracks in the desert area and keeping our eye out for jackrabbits in the garden. After about an hour or so, we had a lady with various creatures come talk to us about them. She showed us a possum, a snake and our all around favorite of the night, a fennec fox. I tried to document as much as could before the sun died down. 

I found out that they have plenty of volunteering positions for things like cultivating, potters, nature guides, etc. They also have a Victorian Society you can volunteer for where you can be a docent in Victorian attire. Volunteers for this learn historical facts about Dr. Clark, Heritage House, Fullerton and Orange County.

ralph b. clark

 

 Natalie has begun her softball practices already and we are blessed enough to have them at the lovely Ralph B. Clark Regional Park. Before practice started, we visited the lake and we were both pretty pleased at seeing water lilies for the first time. Afterward, while she learned plays, pitches, bunts, etc. I got to wander around a bit...

 

The park is filled with jackrabbits and squirrels, everywhere! I had a lot of photos but the zoom on my camera phone is not that great. Just pretend in all these photos, there are sweet little creatures hiding everywhere (which they were)!

 

It also has plenty of nice spots for picnics as well as some volleyball courts too.

 

They have a stage area which you can rent out and near it is the Interpretive Center. It's small but the animal bones found inside are quite big. They have mammoth bones as well as skeletons of other animals that were native to the area from thousands of years before. I never knew a giant sloth was, well, so gigantic!

I am hoping to score more pretty photos from this place but all in all, you can't beat a beautiful park...