Fun Times!

Life has been pretty busy lately! Our community participated in the 4th Annual Mount Holly Lantern Parade, so for the past several months we have been constructing lanterns. Minion lanterns, to be exact. We made two large minions, four smaller minions and a handful of bananas. We coordinated with the art class of the Mount Holly Middle School, and the kids made an additional 40 or 50 small minion lanterns. 

The initial construction was wire and duct tape, to which we added mini light strands. This was covered with a shell of translucent white paper, and then topped with colored construction paper. It was a process, to say the least. The parade theme was "Let's All Go to the Movies", and at first I was unsure of doing minions. I'll confess I knew nothing about the characters, so I had to sit down and watch one of the movies. I have to say, the minions were a hug crowd-pleaser. The judges took note of this, and we ended up winning first place in the "Group" category. Not bad for our first rodeo! It was a blast to walk in the parade with the kids. The adults wore yellow shirts, blue suspenders and yellow hard hats, and all of our group wore minion face masks. Those were a great way to ensure mask compliance. I added a unique touch to our costumes by making minion glasses out of canning jar rims.

The theme for next year is "Written in the Stars", which sounds very broad. Our group is getting together tomorrow night to begin planning our entry. The pressure is on since we took 1st this year.

Minion Mania!

We took a quick overnight drive up to Blowing Rock, NC on October 26th to photograph the fall color. We sure found some nice foliage! The previous two Octobers here the colors were virtually non-existent. It did our Midwest hearts good to see the pretty reds and oranges this year.

finding fall

  
On October 30th Imagery had a Halloween Pet Parade. There were two categories - cutest and best matched. We don't have a dog right now, but we sure enjoyed photographing the event. The parade was followed by a demonstration of the K-9 unit of the Mount Holly police department.

pet parade

On Halloween, the Lifestyle Director brought a band in to perform in the afternoon. The weather was perfect for us to be outside listening to some great music. Jim and I reprised our minion costumes as we knew our lanterns were going to be out on display. We never got a good picture of us the day of the parade, so we were able to rectify that on Sunday.

Minions 'R Us

Tuesday was such a pretty day that we decided to take our kayaks out on Mountain Island Lake. We found some beautiful color along the shoreline as we paddled along, and even startled a blue heron who was napping in the afternoon sunlight. As the weather has since turned rainy and chilly, I'm glad we took advantage of the day. 

Mountain Island Lake