The First Signs of Autumn 🍂 and my Secret Project!

It feels like it has been absolutely ages since I last spoke to you and the past couple of months have been pretty busy. I have been working on my calendars. Last year I launched my calendars in October. I had left it way too late. I told myself that this year I would be way more organized and I managed to finish the 2027 calendars in early August but I have also been really busy working on a really fun winter project and I'm really excited to show you. I thought today we could just have a cozy catch-up. I'm going to go to the squirrel forest this afternoon and also just welcome autumn and you might think it's August. Autumn is nowhere about. However in northern Sweden we could get snow in October so it is already feeling quite autumnal and there are some leaves falling to the ground already. There are mushrooms. I saw my first amanita mushroom two days ago. So if that sounds good to you, let's enjoy this day together and I think we can start with putting up some autumn decorations. I have been wanting to go into this cupboard for like two weeks to get out some of my autumn things and now I'm allowing myself to do it. Welcome to a cupboard you've never seen before. So my plan is to create an autumnal kitchen table display. The funny thing is almost everything in this box has been given to me as a birthday present. My birthday is on the 20th of September and I think we all associate our birthdays with the season so to me my birthday always felt like the golden time of autumn and I used to spend a lot of time photographing red deer in my local deer park and so I would go there for sunrise during the rut and I remember like the first cold crisp mornings and spiders. Okay, I'm gonna turn them on. Hopefully they work. Amish got these for me so she's gonna notice them. I just found another bouquet of dried flowers in the basement and I'm going to combine them with this one and I love dried flowers because I think it really works for winter and autumn rather than having fresh flowers. How you dry wild flowers is you bunch up the flowers whether it's a bouquet that you've bought or from the garden and then you just hang them upside down and they dry out and it's a bit messy like you will lose some leaves and petals and it's not perfect but some of these have dried really well they still have their colour especially some of the roses they look really nice. I just left the house to go to the squirrel forest and it started raining it doesn't matter I'm still going to go but I thought I'd show you the garden a little update the pond is doing very well we think the waterfall is leaking a bit so at the moment we've got it off but it doesn't seem to impact algae I mean it's pretty clean we also planted this flower bed and we've got some roses and other flowers I bought a lot of flowers on discount so let's see if they survive but it's looking quite nice and I also bought another apple tree and it actually has little tiny apples growing hi hi sorry I'm late put some nuts here for you ready hi hi you okay? it has stopped raining and I am with Sylvie Sylvester and she is already preparing for autumn another squirrel has literally just arrived I'm just gonna film him is that junior that looks like junior that's a very junior pose hi friend you're a funny guy oh what a fun guy junior he's just funky I've just changed position does this look strange sorry I think I'm going to do my squirrel update quite quickly since it is raining a lot and I am in a dress and tights so frustrating it wasn't supposed to rain today and it has pretty much rained all summer it has been the wettest summer I have ever experienced here it's kind of annoying that it has rained so much but I'm sure rain is better than severe drought so let me tell you about buddy before I tell you about what happened to buddy I want to share that the squirrels are slowly working on my website for the upcoming launch and thank you Squarespace for sponsoring this video I love how easy it is to make a professional website on Squarespace without needing any code however I actually did go the further step and add this magical snow falling down the screen I don't want to reveal too much at this stage but my Christmas shop is now live and you can check it out the templates on Squarespace make it so easy to start and customize you can add your own colors and fonts and of course sell products both digital and physical if you'd like to give Squarespace a go head to squarespace.com slash Danny Connor wild and you can save 10% off a new purchase of a website or a domain so if you remember in my garden video I mentioned that buddy has a broken leg and two broken fingers this is Sylvie she is absolutely fine I didn't really know what buddy's future would look like with his disability and he disappeared and around July I started to get really like upset because I thought that was it and it had been almost 80 days that I hadn't seen him and every month I've now started to do a patreon livestream and literally about 20 minutes before I started the livestream buddy showed up so buddy is alive he now has half a tail so something else has happened to him I was hoping that we would see him but we saw junior and I haven't seen junior since March maybe February so you know the squirrels are now coming back to the squirrel forest autumn is approaching as you can see with Sylvie she's very busy with cashing and I'm getting chilly my next letter from the wild is about late summer harvests and I had this little fun photo shoot with Sylvie oh hello there is one more hazelnut I promise you I just love them so much one big tip I have for if you're photographing or watching squirrels don't move or talk as soon as they have the nut wait for them to leave because then they're way more comfortable of you it's so easy now to recognize buddy oh my gosh this was so funny buddy got a bit annoyed at me and he was swishing his tail because that's what they do when they're annoyed and when they have a long tail it swishes but now that he's got this short tail it was just like bobbing side to side it was so amusing I didn't get to film it but I need to film that is very funny poor buddy I have no idea what happened to him or his tail oh okay look up here okay that's it yes yes yes hot hot hot hot bingo good you're welcome you're most welcome so Sylvie and I we had our photo shoot and I prepared these wooden dishes with various different wild berries such as cloud berries bilberries yes not hatches what is this commotion drama okay I need to put my jacket on I am chilly so let me tell you about the secret project so last December I filmed the lead-up to Christmas every day 24 videos and we got closer together as an audience and in January I was thinking of more ways that the next vlogmas can be even more engaging and interactive and I came up with the idea of creating a paper mail pack where there are certain days during December that we will open elements of this mail pack together and we will do different activities during vlogmas I don't want to give too much away because part of the magic is that you open things during December and it will be a bit of a surprise and it will be it should be very fun but I'm going to show you some behind the scenes and let me actually explain how it will work so on the first day of vlogmas or the 1st of December you will open this and there will be a letter that welcomes you to this experience and within the package will be four individually wrapped presents or separate items that are wrapped in recycled tissue paper everything in this pack is made from recycled paper so you open the first pack on the 1st of December and there will be several items which are more like presents or like ornaments for your house I am creating a wooden ornament of Buddy and there will be craft activities recipes and then the following week you open the second pack and then the following week another one and then a few days before Christmas you open the final fourth pack so some of the things I have been making and honestly I've had so much fun I've been doing this with my patrons but we are creating the squirrel times written by Buddy he is the editor but there's a page or two called ask Buddy and my patrons have sent various questions photos poems to Buddy and he will respond I have also literally been writing a children's book this is little squirrel and he looks very cute and my story follows little squirrel and there's a little feast I have been painting for maybe an hour or two now and I've been doing the backgrounds for the children's book illustration and I watched a few tutorials and I've been using cling film to basically dab the wet paint and it creates like a snowy kind of effect and it adds texture and it looks really nice for drawings here and I've just done a wash of like light blue so that will be the snow and then I do shadows and then this one you can see the shape of the squirrel this is like a stormy scene so it's really dark and it's coming together it's really nice to use watercolor I haven't used watercolor in a while it's tricky though because you have to work around the white because you can't paint white watercolor so you have to start light and then go darker but I'm actually going to do a mix of traditional watercolor and also digital so once I finish my illustrations I'm going to take photos bring them into procreate and then use an Apple pencil to add more snow and white areas this is the first part of my illustrating I have done everything by watercolor but I wanted to give everything a little bit more magic on procreate with a like a digital pencil watercolor is so interesting because you have to paint light to dark you can't go in with black paint or dark blue and then paint white snow on top and I have found that a little bit tricky there's also going to be a sticker pack and these are going to be stickers I have also designed my house into a paper craft and I'm going to make it later so we will see so for dinner tonight we're having something new and we have looked at this fake meat product for years and thought oh the name is very funny because it's juicy marbles which is quite silly and we were just like let's try it and generally I would say the past year or two we eat way more like whole foods like pulses lentils chickpeas beans tofu rather than the fake meats so it's a bit of a treat we don't usually have this and let's see how it goes not convinced so I am now going to make the paper house this is the prototype the one that you'll receive will be on card paper and here there will be instructions something that I also didn't mention is that each week there will be a secret page on my website and each week you get a little QR code and there'll be other things available that are digital like desktop backgrounds phone backgrounds I'm going to make like a podcast version of the illustrated book so I will narrate it and there'll be ambient sounds but there will also be digital copies of the crafts so if you wanted to you could print 20 more of these at home and have a whole Christmas tree with little red houses but I'm going to make it now I've just finished and it is so cute it's so little you could easily put thread through the roof like white thread and just have it as an ornament or just have it on your desk somewhere so I made the design in Photoshop I then transferred it to procreate and I created the front door reef and it's supposed to be our house there's a couple of changes I need to make oh my gosh you could make it into a garland oh that'd be so cute like if you printed five you could attach five by string and have them hanging that would be cool anyway it's very cute very cute