What Have I Been Up To?

This:

This:

And a lot of this:

Oh and pumpkins!

There has also been much decorating for Halloween (even though it is so warm here you wouldn't know it was fall), so pictures of that soon!

Giveaway Winner And Lovely Things

Hello everyone! I admit that I am bit late in announcing the winner of the giveaway for my Mad Tea Party, but then what would a Mad Tea Party be without always running late? Anyway, through the use of a random number generator, a winner has been chosen. And that person is......comment #10, our lovely hostess herself, Miss Vanessa!

Hooray! I can think of no one better to win than the lady who made this mad party possible, can you? Miss V, you win the tea cup, saucer, and dessert plate, as well as your choice of tea from Chantilly tea room! Here is a link for a list of all of our teas: http://www.chantillytearoom.com/pages/teas.html I am not sure how recently that has been updated so we might have others if you have a favorite that you don't see on there. Thanks again for being such a great hostess!

Now on to photos of pretty things from the last few weeks.

My new desk/drafting table!

My pumpkins.

I found a lot more Lewises on my orange tree. This is just one little guy.

Amazing Arizona storms.

Tea time, of course.

Well that is all for now. See you soon!

Afternoon And Evening Loveliness

So as I have probably mentioned many times, I work at a tea room. For someone who loves tea and all things tea related like me, this is a both a wonderful and dangerous job. The dangerous part is that I end up coming home with WAY too much stuff. But how can I resist when it is free! If something breaks like a tea cup, but the saucer is still good, or if something gets chipped, they cannot use it in the tea room anymore. It breaks my heart to see it get thrown out (to be fair a lot of it gets broken up to use for the broken china frames) so I have to adopt it!

I end up with all the little orphaned bits of china. I have about six or seven random saucers that do not have cups. Now there are a lot of things you can do with just saucers, two of my favorites being candle and jewelry holders, but recently I had an epiphany. I have all these white cups in the garage that are a similar shape to tea cups, but thicker and do not have saucers. I never used them because I always just used my beautiful tea cups. Once I realized I could pair them up with my lonely saucers, hallelujah!

So I have been using them a lot lately. Today I was feeling very bright so I had tea with a lot of pretty colored dishes.

My sandwiches were cucumber (one of the ladies at work has crazy amounts of cucumbers growing in her garden and I am reaping the rewards, huzzah!) and basil, mozzarella, and tomato (those are two different sandwiches) and my tea was Windsor Castle - black tea, toasty Darjeeling notes, Assam maltiness, lively Ceylon flavor.

I have been having some lovely evenings as well. It is funny because if I sit outside it is a summer evening, but if I sit inside with the a/c on I can get cozy and pretend that fall is on its way even though it is still super hot here and will be for quite a while. Here are both versions as well as some of the amazing clouds we have been having lately.

We even had a real proper storm tonight with rain that lasted more than five minutes, yay! Sigh, things have been lovely and happy of late.