This fall has been absolutely spectacular, and I've had a lot of fun exploring the area and filming it. The leaves’ color has stayed for much longer this year, than it has for the past 4 years I've been here, almost as if mother nature was making up for last fall.

A couple of months ago, I read an article about an actor who spent a month and a half in complete solitude, in order to develop the character he was about to perform for a movie. His 6 weeks of intensely dedicated focus really stuck with me for some reason, and I couldn't get it out of my mind.

A couple of months ago, I decided that I was going to make a jacket out of a bleach stained holey shirt and pillow case that I got from the goodwill outlet. My goal was to take discarded items and put them together in a meaningful way, to create something beautiful that I could treasure forever.

Fall is one of my favorite times of year, and last year, our Fall was a little intense here in Western North Carolina, so I spent most of it in survival mode.

At the end of last winter, I got the idea to make a coat out of an old quilt that I got from my mom. The quilt was made by my great great grandmother, and it had sat in a bag in the back of a closet for almost 50 years.

I went to Italy for 10 days in September, because my beautiful friend Michele was getting married up in the Dolomites. This was my first time out of the country in 11 years, and my first time back in Europe in 17 years.

I don't believe in pure coincidence. I may have, at some point in my life, but the more life I've experienced, and the deeper I've observed my experiences, the more impossible it's become to believe that things just randomly happen at random times, for no particular reason.

This was my first refashioning project. I bought the dress for $3 from the Goodwill Outlet, or “The Bins” as it’s called, and I deconstructed the dress and used a pattern to create the new dress. In the future, I won’t use a pattern unless I know for sure that I have enough fabric to cut all of the pieces as solid pieces, but I made this one work.

I started sewing this dress a year ago, but as it is the most complex thing I've ever sewn, I stopped out of frustration, several times, and then finally finished it up this winter. My mom got me the fabric from a yard sale, which makes me super happy, because it's scrap leftovers that most people would typically just throw into the trash. And this particular piece of scrap was more than enough for me to sew an entire dress out of.

As of this week, it's been five months since Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina and I thought I'd give you all an update on how things are going. It took 7 weeks before I had clean running water back in my home. It's a little hard to believe I went without it for that long, but between my friends' home and the community care stations, I was able to shower and wash my clothes and get all the water I needed. I've never been more grateful for clean running water and hot showers whenever I need them.

I bought this chair for $15 from a thrift store three years ago, with the intention of reupholstering it, because it was in need of a lot of love. The chair itself is I’d say at least 100 years old, made of solid wood that will last at least another 100 years, and it was originally stuffed with straw! I kept that original stuffing in there.

I hate throwing things away. Especially something like this sweater, where most of the piece is still completely in tact and useful, and will be for quite a few years. The combination of the fast fashion clothing industry's crap quality clothes, with our modern day mentally of "if it's broken, throw it out" means that there is a lot of clothing that's ending up in landfills each year.

You know what's kind of weird? Every single one of our ancestors knew how to feed themselves, and preserve foods for winter - except for those fancy pants people who had servants available to do that for them. Nowadays, however, there are many people who probably couldn't even prepare a box of mac-n-cheese for themselves, much less cook a meal from scratch, or preserve vegetables, fruits and meat for the winter.

I’ve been working on myself pretty much non-stop for almost 20 years now. It started when I moved back to California, after living in Spain for 2 years, and I grew super depressed and unhappy with my existence. I thought my life was over at that point, and that it was time to dedicate all of my focus to doing things like “building a career,” “paying a mortgage” and “saving money for retirement.”

In the fall, my mom gave me this old quilt top that her quilting club received as a donation, because she thought I might want to make a skirt out of it. I love doing this kind of stuff and one of the main reasons I wanted to start sewing as an adult was so that I could upcycle old unwanted clothes, or bedding into new clothing.

This past summer, I experimented with growing my own sweet potatoes for the first time. The whole entire process was so much fun for me to experience. I got a lot of joy out of watching a couple of old sweet potatoes grow roots and shoots, then watching those shoots turn into bushy vines, and then harvesting tubers at the end of the growing season.

Over the past year, I’ve been learning how to metalsmith jewelry, and recently, I’ve been spending more time in the jewelry studio, which has required that I tote my pieces to and from my house on a weekly basis. I didn’t have a way to nicely tote my projects and tools around, so I took a trip to a local antique store and found this dusty old carpenter box, hiding in a cramped, dark booth, just waiting for me to find it and bring it back to life.

I've been wanting to experiment with hot composting for a while now, but I'd been holding out on building a compost bin, as this isn't my forever home. After the hurricane, however, I needed a bin to properly process the, uh, we'll say “ingredients" from my composting toilet. And for something like that, I wanted to make sure I did it properly and in a contained fashion.

A couple of weeks before Hurricane Helene, I found this very cool, but very trashed antique sewing machine for free on the side of the road. I’d been wanting one of those things for a long time, but they’re pretty expensive, so if you can imagine, I was out of my mind excited when I saw one for free on the side of the road. 

For a few years now, I've thought quite a bit about modern humanity's complete dependence upon these massive centralized systems that can very easily break at any given moment. Our food system, water system, electricity, internet, cell service, all of it just bam, crash at any moment. During Hurricane Helene, I saw all of those systems break down (excluding food) and they haven't even all come back online almost a month later here in Western North Carolina.