October COLOR Challenge – Orange palette

Orange is difficult for me…Clemson University (orange and purple) is arch rivals with my University of South Carolina Gamecocks. I have been working on some fall layouts so I will check out the colors. To use your exact colors, I may need to change my layouts…but I can do that.

Thank you, Carole, for the challenge…this one and all the ones you give us each month.

Finished my October Color Challenge, and it was a challenge to use those colors! My theme is The Legend of Sleepy Hollow which was a story written by Washington Irving, of Rip Van Winkle fame. Sleepy Hollow is an actual village not far from me, south of me, near Tarrytown, NY. This entails a lot of journaling which I will post separately also. It may be hard to read in the reduced version for The Campus.

Here’s the text:

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow begins in 1790 in a small town named Sleepy Hollow, near modern-day Tarrytown. The town is believed to be haunted, owing to a witch’s curse in the early days of the Dutch Settlement, or potentially the sorcery of an old Native American chief, depending on who you ask. The most feared spirit in the town is the legendary Headless Horseman, supposedly the ghost of a Hessian mercenary who lost his head to a cannonball during the Revolutionary War, and roams the town in search of his head.

The protagonist of the story is Ichabod Crane, a tall, lanky, schoolmaster prone to superstition, who has recently arrived in the town from Connecticut. He is infatuated with Katrina Van Tassel, the 18-year-old daughter of the town’s richest man. He’s attracted by her beauty, but he also sees marrying her as a chance to get his hands on the family wealth. He has a rival for her hand in Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, a rowdy drunkard who is beloved by the town for his strength. The two quickly become enemies, with Brom Bones pulling mean-spirited pranks on Ichabod in an attempt to scare off his rival.
The rivalry comes to a head at a harvest party at the Van Tassel home. Ichabod attends the party, eating more than his share and attempting to woo Katrina. Brom Bones captivates the party by telling ghost stories, with the locals becoming involved as well. The tale of the Headless Horseman is the center of the tale, and Ichabod is rattled by the story. His attempt to propose to Katrina goes poorly, and having failed to win her hand, he heads out into the woods to return home on his horse with a heavy heart. As he travels the distance home, he passes by many sites that were listed as haunted by the revelers, and he becomes more and more frightened of what may surround him. However, he doesn’t actually see anything, until he arrives at an intersection in a dark swamp.

Waiting for him is a mysterious, cloaked rider who seems unnaturally large. Unnerved, Ichabod is then horrified to see that the rider does not have his head on his shoulders. Rather, the Horseman is carrying it on his saddle. Ichabod breaks into a panicked run as the Headless Horseman gives chase. Ichabod makes his way to the bridge next to a cemetery, and sees the Headless Horseman vanish in a flash of fire and brimstone. Ichabod urges his horse onward, only to see the Horseman suddenly leap over the bridge, rear up his horse, and hurl his severed head directly at Ichabod Crane.

Ichabod Crane is never seen again in Sleepy Hollow. With his mysterious absence, Katrina accepts the proposal of Brom Bones, who many observe seems like he knows something whenever the subject of Ichabod’s disappearance is mentioned. The only traces of Ichabod ever found are his horse, saddle, hat, and a mysterious shattered pumpkin. Who was the Headless Horseman? Was it Brom Bones, using his size to impersonate the ghoul and scare Ichabod out of town, using a pumpkin to represent the severed head? Or was Ichabod Crane spirited away by something dark and supernatural? The answer is never found, with some saying he fled to another town and married a rich widow, and others insisting that the Headless Horseman got him.

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