Please, Come Inside! New Autumnal Portraits and My Festive Home

Do you want to know what I hate most about Halloween?

Oh… please don’t misunderstand… I actually love Halloween! It’s my second favorite holiday, trailing closely behind Christmas.

(Because, really, what could ever top Christmas?)

However, every time October 1st rolls around and the Halloween decorations begin to once again appear in the stores and front yards of North America, there is one thing that irks me: all the bloody gruesomeness.

To me Halloween is about celebrating the beauty of Autumn and the end of the Harvest season, with pumpkins and brightly colored leaves, not blood and mummies, and things that, as a 26 year old, I should probably be embarrassed to say still keep me up at night. Rather, I love my home to look eclectic and cozy once the first few days of Autumn roll around, with old books, tattered table cloths, and hand painted pumpkins (ok… and maybe a skull or two…).

And so I have decided that one of the best parts about growing up is finally having a place to put up all the decorations that, as a less-transient individual, I now have a reason to buy in bulk every time I visit Home Goods or the Christmas Tree Shoppes. That’s what being an adult is, right? The ability to slowly accumulate holiday decorations year after year, gradually improving your decorating game with each passing holiday? I hope that’s what it means because, if so, I am winning at this adulting thing.

Some of my favorite acquisitions since moving to Boston are my crow, named Lucius (pronounced loo-see-us, of course), and my sugar skull from Mexico (thank you Momma!).

This year, as I was pulling out all my decorations (and yes, collecting a few more trinkets from my favorite stores), I began to be inspired to create some Autumnal pictures with all the beautiful leaves and evening light as my backdrop. I had had some russet chiffon sitting in my fabric cupboard for quite a while when I realized it was the perfect color for the autumnal shoot I envisioned.

While digging around for some white fabric for the lining, I came across the underskirt from a wedding dress I had deconstructed to use in creating this dress. On a hunch, I pinned up the sides I had previously taken apart, draped it over my hoop skirt, and stepped back in excited anticipation. It was the exact shape I had had in mind for the mid-1800’s inspired skirt I wanted to create. After several hours spent adding the russet chiffon to the outside, I embarrassingly almost started to tear up when I stepped back from the finished costume. It was so close to what I had envisioned, that it was almost a surreal moment.

(It’s just a skirt, Madeline. Pull yourself together).

The emotions ran even more when I put the costume on my friend Kari, her hair and makeup done to perfection, with the cocktail hat perched perfectly askew atop her head, I felt like squealing the moment we settled into our location and she began to pose. I use the word magical a lot, but, for lack of a better word, this shoot really was just magical! I could have spent hours running from place to place with Kari, creating an entire book’s worth of images. Fortunately for my exhausted friend, the sun quickly slipped away as night began to approach, taking my beautiful autumnal light with it, the magic coming to an end. The wonderful thing about photography though, is that the magic can always be revisited, and so I feel like I will do many times with this shoot.