April and May have been a blur of flowers, birds, hard work, and poison ivy.
As mentioned in a previous post, we’ve been doing some pretty extreme work on our property, so here’s a collection of photos from the last two months.
Mom finally brought the poetry magnets back out, so our fridge is currently full of them
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
Living in New England, I think that March might be the most dramatic month of the whole year.
On the third of March we went “hiking” and ended up clumsily tripping through three feet of snow, but by the end of the month the ground was clear, and flowers were blooming.
You can watch my 60-second March wrap here!
March 3rd, we definitely underestimated how much snow would still be at our local park; watch my spring vlog here!
It’s official: winter is here and Christmas is almost upon us! And believe it or not, I’ve watched almost all of my favorite Christmas movies, and I’m done making gifts. Done making gifts before the last hours of Christmas Eve, truly a miracle.
Under our tree is looking full this year, and the tree itself has a total of five strands of Christmas lights wrapped around it. At night it absolutely glows, and Dad has said on multiple occasions that it looks like it belongs in a movie.
I’m working on using every last day to post Christmas content on my YouTube page, because this seasonal aesthetic must be taken full advantage of!
One of my newest creative projects has been shadowbox making.
I knew I wanted to make some as Christmas gifts, and I had already had this idea (and had pinned a whole bunch of inspiration onto a secret Pinterest board!) before we went on vacation.
I also knew that vacation would be a perfect time to collect some items; down by the coast there’s plenty of lovely pieces of nature, and of course the cherry on top is that much of it came from some of our favorite places.
Exciting news: I’ve partnered up with Riley Mae and Mom to design some bird merch for Riley Mae’s YouTube channel, and yesterday we official launched it 🎉
I was excited to get to design some simple, straightforward birds that are now being printed on t-shirts, mugs, pins, hats, and more.
All of these designs were drawn directly from some of Riley Mae’s photographs, and then painted with black acrylic paint before I scanned them onto my computer and turned them into transparent PNG files that can easily be uploaded to all of our projects.
carolina wren, ruby-throated hummingbird, sanderling, blue jay, northern cardinal, northern flicker, turkey vulture
Usually while I eat breakfast I like to scroll through the daily news articles, because there’s always something interesting mixed into the boring stuff. A new fossil discovered? An octopus that’s been recorded punching fish? Red carpet photos from an award show that I didn’t know was going on? All good things to read, look at, watch, and (when it comes to fashion) judge while I eat my homemade sourdough bread, and start my day.
But lately almost every article has been political, with a certain orange-faced idiot and his moronic toadies plastered across all the news story.
As expected, it’s all been not only depressing and scary (exciting news: it’s almost time to try to enroll in healthcare that I’ll probably be denied! 🥂), it’s also been so blatantly and disgustingly hypocritical that it just about makes my blood boil.
As you can imagine: not a great way to start my day. So I decided to take a little break from the daily onslaught of terrible news, and take that time to get back to my Pinterest scrolling instead. After all, tis the season for new inspiration and creativity 🍂
No one can stop me from getting excited about making Christmas ornaments.
my Pinterest feed has been full of vintage-autumn photography vibes, and when I saw the yellow maple leaves falling, I knew I had to get out for a morning photoshoot
I was preparing for this vacation with more than just a little trepidation, because, if I’m being quite honest, I didn’t enjoy last year’s vacation much at all (you can see some photos from it in this post, but I never went into great detail about any of it).
Which really sucked, because everyone else had a grand ol’ time.
I finally finished sifting through my billions of video clips (it was too much, I know); you can check out my collection of vacation Shorts here!
I decided to single-handedly save the monarch population in a single season; you can now refer to me as Monarch Mommy™
This, of course, is a joke (the saving the species part, not the Monarch Mommy™ part), and since raising monarchs indoors can be quite a hot top on the internet (who knew, right?), I’m going to start this post with a clear disclaimer: apparently it’s not been proven that indoor rearing of monarchs has done much — if anything — to help the general monarch population.
Some studies say that, if done improperly, the indoor raising of monarch butterflies can actually have an adverse effect on the general monarch population.
*steps onto my soapbox*
Let me just say that I completely agree with some reasonings (like it can make spreading disease easier), while other reasonings I completely disagree with. For instance, believing that nature successfully “picks off the weak” and that we’re interfering with that process by protecting them?? Um, here’s my hot take: having a wasp lay eggs in a caterpillar doesn’t mean that a caterpillar is weak, it just means that it was one unlucky little dude who now has to endure a horrific death!
I believe that my butterflies were part of the migratory generation (also known as the “super generation”), and they were much larger than other monarchs that I’ve seen around
The fam and I returned from our 6 days of seaside vacationing on Tuesday, and ever since then I’ve been sifting through hundreds of videos and compiling them into aesthetic YouTube shorts (these are pretty much purely for my and my family’s entertainment, but there’s a slight chance that somebody else might enjoy them too).
I was originally throwing around the idea of making a longform video about the trip, but after spending the whole first day of the vacation capturing aesthetically-pleasing footage (think: sanderlings running along the surf in front of a pastel-pink sunset), my camera decided to throw a fit, mess with my SD card, and ultimately lose my gorgeous footage.
art by jordan rae 