Indian Summer

It was way too gorgeous outside today to be fussing with miniatures indoors!  Sunny, blue skies and summertime temperatures enticed me out into the garden to apply gilt paint on the Entrance Hall stair.

Enough of that for today!  Time to take the dogs out for a walk down the street to Minnehaha Park!

Wow!  The leaves are really changing...hard to believe that in a month they will all be gone.

The Sumac are really on fire!

In the middle of the park sits the John Stevens House, the first home built in Minneapolis.  It originally sat downtown, where the Main Post Office is today.  It was identified and saved from demolition and moved to this spot in the late 1800's.  I love this little home!  Wouldn't it make a great dollhouse?

John Stevens

 

Also situated in Minnehaha Park is the Longfellow House.  It was built as a 3/4 scale reproduction of the home of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  Longfellow immortalized Minnehaha Falls in his epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha.  The poem was such a sensation in its day, it made Minnehaha Park a major tourist attraction. Sorry about the exposure.

I think this would make a great dollhouse, too.  The pilasters could hide the seams where it opens up!  I made a birdhouse modeled on the Longfellow House once a while back but I don't have any photos of it.

The flower gardens in back of the Longfellow House are winding down.  We've already had a few overnight frosts.

"From the forests and the prairies,
From the great lakes of the Northland,
From the land of the Ojibways,
From the land of the Dacotahs,
From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands
Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,
Feeds among the reeds and rushes.
I repeat them as I heard them
From the lips of Nawadaha,
The musician, the sweet singer."

Minnehaha Creek flows for several long miles from the eastern shore of Lake Minnetonka, where I grew up, and empties into the Mississippi River, near where I live today.  None of my photographs of Minnehaha Falls turned out --I'll have to show you it some other day.

Whew! Edie & Jack the Shelties are exhausted!  Best get back to the house...Maybe I can get the stairway finished?

Later that night:   The ends of the railing are whispering that they want a curlicue finial to finish themselves off.  I've never used FIMO before, but do you think that would work?  Also, since I finished the stair runners in black marble, should the landing runner be black marble as well? I kind of like it 'as is,' personally.