One other thing I should have added to the long list of Thanksgiving weekend fun — arts and crafts with autumn leaves!

Kelly (aged 11, my next-door neighbour’s granddaughter, visiting from out of town) came over on Thanksgiving Sunday afternoon — as she often does, when spending the weekend at her Grammie’s house.

(And by the way, that’s a pleasure for which I am indeed very thankful.)

We walked with dogs down to the bottom of the hill, collecting great armloads of colourful maple leaves on the way, then came home and folded them into a bouquet of faux roses.

Kelly took this bouquet home to her grandmother.

We went out the next day to get some even better leaves — bright red maple leaves, from down by the brook where this summer’s drought hadn’t robbed the trees of the stronger hues — so she could make more flowers to take to her art teacher when school went back in.

I also printed out the pictures from the maple leaf roses tutorial I’d found, and put the pages into an old binder that was lying around. Kelly is going to decorate the cover of the binder and put her name on it. We’ll use this binder to compile a How-To Book of all the activities we do together on her visits, and I like to think that she’ll share it with friends… and maybe, some day in the far future, with children of her own.

I found this great craft idea last autumn, but just a few days too late to collect a bunch of autumn leaves while they were at their brilliant best colours. This year, it’s high on my to-do list! The big sugar maple out front is turning an incredible vibrant red just now…

In a superior step-by-step photographic tutorial, Natale shows how to make roses out of colorful autumn leaves — maple leaves, to be exact, perfect for us Canadians!

She gives a commentary, too, but the online translators can’t quite handle the task… Never mind, the photographs are enough to transcend any language barriers, speaking with the language of faux flowers!

Make a point to pick yourself some colourful maple leaves before they fall, so they’ll still be soft and pliable enough to fold up tightly. Or possibly it might help to treat them with just the tiniest bit of glycerine? Could try it both ways…

Just feel free to rake me up in a big sack and throw me on the compost pile, if I don’t get around to trying this fabulous autumn craft before the trees are bare!

I was just out in the garden, starting in on the sad autumn clearing up in preparation for winter, half-thinking about getting started on the mulching. But already the mice are starting to find nice homes for themselves in the flower bed, among the dying leaves of the daylilies and in the leftover summer mulch.

Note to self: don’t put the winter mulch on the flower gardens until the ground has frozen!

Otherwise, the field mice will surely dig their burrows in around and under the roots of the plants. That makes pockets in the soil for water to collect in, when we get the heavy autumn rains, and then freeze.

I’m pretty sure that’s how I lost some lovely plants last year. If the ice in the mouse holes didn’t heave them right out of the ground, the roots just rotted away from the extra moisture around them in the early spring.

I don’t much like mice, even when they’re outdoors where they belong, and not in my kitchen cupboards! But that’s a whole other topic…