Weekend Basics

The leaves are falling, the breeze is in the air, and Basil declares we are in the midst of a beautiful autumn! We snagged this shot of him during an early afternoon walk down Monument Avenue Sunday — he just laid down happily in the leaves as if he could just lounge there the rest of the day.

Basil's stance above could pretty much sum up the overall feeling of our homebody weekend. We kept close to home while unpacking and unwinding from our week in NYC. It was the first weekend we had a steady fire light up the fireplace and I cooked while Mary got creative with some new jewelry designs.

In terms of cooking, I was eager to get home and begin working with the pork from last Friday's day at Lockhart Farm. Find the full background on my day at the farm and the pork I brought home in today's post over on E.A.T.

While the majority of cuts went into the freezer to preserve, I was able to get working with rendering the fat, smoking a Boston butt, and the beginning stages of curing the pork belly for some (what I hope will be) ridiculously good bacon.

I'm really looking forward to sharing more about all the things going on with this pig over the next several months.

In more homebody happenings, Mary curled up with Basil next to the fire and worked on packaging up the slew of early holiday orders that came in over the past week from the jewelry shop. It's always a welcome reminder that November is here when we start making multiple walks to the post box in a single day.

There's also a new batch of limited designs she created from vintage odds and ends we've come across in our estate adventures — find them newly listed over in the shop and Mary wants me to tell you to keep a lookout for more to come:

While on the topic of our Etsy shops, we found the time to photograph some of the other fun and quirky vintage finds we've come across over the past several weeks — including this small collection of offbeat cologne bottles from Avon in the 1970's:

We somehow came into an entire collection of these funny Avon aftershave bottles that were completely unused and in their original packaging. While not super rare, we just love the novelty factor of them. When setting up for photographing, I kept teasing Mary about how I was going to try out each of the different cologne scents (they had amazing names like "Wild Country," "Brisk Spice," and "Deep Woods") to see which one she liked best. We laughed and laughed about how they smelled like our grandparents — we can't get over that golden bust statue of Old Abe up there either. Find these and other vintage oddities newly listed over in the vintage shop.

On the garden front, we had time to plant some recently propagated rosemary cuttings and harvest our brussels sprout plant out front — more on both of these to come later this week! Oh yeah, I also got my hairs cut.

Hope you had a great weekend — they're calling for a possible wintry mix headed our way this week. We're crossing our fingers at a chance to see some snowflakes.