Early Holiday Festivities

Earlier this month, Mike was awake before me (as usual) on a Saturday morning. Once a reasonable hour rolled around, he opened the drapes in the bedroom and surprised me with this!Snow! It's all melted now but it was a nice big dump!

The cookie exchange went off without any major hitches. Cookies included sugar cookies, spritz, 2 types of brownies, snickerdoodles, no-bake cookies, toffee chip, and chocolate chip.
Our new white tree was all decorated for the occasion.Every year I give away a prize for finding the pickle ornament but because it's white I thought it would be too easy to find so we played Christmas Bingo instead. What a fiasco! Let's say just Bingo will not be making a re-appearance next year! Check out my igloo cheeseball.Complete with black olive penguins! It was a fun night and the only time each year I see some of my friends so it was great to get together.

Naughty or Nice?

It may behoove you to check your status with Santa since Christmas is right around the corner! Luckily, I am sweeter then ribbon candy!

The last of the Halloween pictures

At work, we take Halloween seriously! Yes, we do a holiday party around Christmas time, but Halloween is the REAL party! The library is host to a trick-or-treat party for parents and kids, complete with goody bags, apple cider, and picture-taking station. Then the kids go around to everyone's offices to fill their bags with even more candy!

And I am right at the epicenter as my office is IN the library! That also means I get to help decorate, which is tons of fun (and tons of work). My friend Jay created this creepy monster bookcase. I decided to create a few new projects this year. This is my spooky jar display. Some of the jars include: egg capsules and their resultant mucous (fake plastic grapes in green water), sample taken from lycanthrope den (the contents of my vacuum cleaner after doing the living room) and maggots of flesh eating flies (plastic stuffing pellets suspended between oil and red water).

This big plastic bag spider was also new. He's stuffed with crumpled newspapers, which we always have TONS of at the end of each week when we recycle the old newspapers.

This week is always festive at work and people wear their costumes on Friday! Here's my Punky Brewster costume.

I did lots of spirderwebs this year, I think it added an eerie vibe without being ogry. (I made a promise to a few people at work not to put the dead bodies/body parts/gory stuff out this year since some kids got scared last year.)

Getting spooky at work!

Another Halloween themed post for Living Locurto'sHalloween Blog Party! This time, for charity!

Our fall/Halloween Drop in and Decorate party was today! We decorated nearly 200 cookies for donation to the local shelter and we'll deliver them tomorrow. The lovely Lydia who heads up Drop In now had a blog for DI&D so go visit and say hi! And I encourage everyone to get a few friends together and decorate some cookies for a food pantry, shelter, or crisis center. Everyone has enjoyed the cookies we've donated so much, sometimes it's the simplest things that can brighten someone's day. A decorated cookie carries with it the time, effort and creativity you put into it and people can feel that. Here are some pictures from today's gathering.

Here are some of my fantastic coworkers hard at work.

This is our jumble of a conference table, full of cookies, frosting and decorating supplies. And here are all the lovely cookies. Well, not all, but some!

Spooky porch completed

Another Halloween Blog Party post!

Here it is, my spooky front porch! You saw my in-progress shot of the front porch. I added a bit more, including my carved, light-up Funkin and more lights in the garage windows. We live on a dead-end street and usually would like for people to read the no-outlet sign and NOT come down it just to have to turn around. But I want visibility during Halloween to entice any and all Trick-or-Treaters! So the garage, what you can see from the cross street, got more attention once I looked down our street and couldn't even see all my hard work on the porch! I changed the lightbulb above the door to a blue one inspired by this front yard in a town nearby, though ours is not nearly as creepy or full of skeletons!:

Here's a little cutey that was helping me outside the other day. And what do you know, he's Halloween colors!

And this is a picture of my toilet. Well, the back of my toilet. My mom gave me this cute cat when I visited the other weekend. He's sharing my wishes for you, a very Happy Halloween!

Boo-tiful Decor!

Another day, another Halloween post for Living Locurto's Halloween Blog Party

This vignette is the corner of my living room with all those lovely windows. I tied wide black ribbon into a bow around the lamp, added a cauldron and Halloween knick-knacks to the table and bat cutouts to the windows. One of the windows (that faces the street) has purple lights around it. Oh, and that? That's my pet giant orange-striped spider! You don't have one? Sometimes the web covers the tv, but it comes off with Clorox Anywhere spray. :)

This is my buffet, which I'm not exactly happy with just yet but I think I've put enough thought into Halloween this year and need to move on to other things! It's got some pumpkins (from the garden of course), an old light-up skeleton, a needlepoint Halloween cat and other various spooky things like candles and a chain.

And here is my table display. Plenty more pumpkins!

Halloween Blog Party!

I'm excited to be participating in Living Locurto's Halloween Blog Party, now until the 31st! All this week and next I'll be posting fun Halloween pictures! Let's first talk about costumes!

I love dressing up and you can see my Halloween costumes from every year here at my flickr. This year I must be out of ideas because I will be recreating my costume from 1987.

Yes, Punky Brewster! This year's costume will include her classic jean jacket!

I also love dressing up my pets, no matter their size. Meg, the Belgian Mule, dressed up like a Ca-Mule (get it, camel?) and I was her Bedouin owner. If you think this is as hilarious as I do, you can vote for this picture in Martha Stewart's Pet Costume Contest. Sully also has some pictures entered, like his adorable Fairy Steed Costume and his Super-Sully costume.

Fanciful Twist Halloween Blog Party!

Fanciful Twist is hosting a Fantabulous Blog Party for Halloween today! So I thought I'd show you my most recent project and my entry hall decor.

I saw some great banners in Woman's Day magazine that used newsprint in a really fun way! I've never thought of newsprint as a craft medium except for making mock-ups and pattern pieces. But when you think about it, it's black and white, perfect for Halloween and has a sort of scientist-bookish-vintage feel to it. But it's not very durable so I lined it with cardstock to give it more rigidity and hopefully be able to use them in years to come. They are stung onto knobby yarn.

This one is hanging in my entry way and I think it really completes my spooky mirror area. On the shelf are fun holiday knick-knacks I've picked up over the years. The skeleton is a nut-cracker! And of course my spooky prints from Mom found a home for the holiday!

The longer one (and boy is it long, about 8 feet long) is for work and will hang in front of my office, facing the library where the party is held on Halloween. More about the work festivities next week when we are allowed to start decorating the library! (We have a conference and guests this week and I suppose they don't want to see dismembered limbs sticking out of the scanner or bats hanging from the light fixtures!

These two paper cutout decorations are in the kitchen. They are kind of beat up and kitschy but they remind me of school classroom party decorations from years gone by so I keep them around.

Craft ideas 2008!

Lulu needs some craft ideas! And she's willing to pay for them. (Well, she'll give you a chance to win some Michael's money, anyway.) So I thought I'd share all the crafts that are on my To-Do list! Each of these projects has a tutorial or instructions, just follow the link.

Felted Mushrooms-adorable and so many different varieties! These would look great sprinkled along my sideboard. (What do you call you sideboard? A buffet? A credenza?)

Some super-cute Cupcake Washcloths-Can't you just see all the different color combos? Pink and brown, blue and yellow, white and brown with sprinkles!

More crochet, Hearts-If I start now, I'll have enough to make a super-sweet banner for Valentine's day!

I've seen so many great slipper patterns out there (like this or this)but I could not get these super-cute ones out of my head so I bought the pattern.

And while I was buying patterns, I also bought this hat pattern. It's a turkey. You know, for Thanksgiving. Which I will totally be wearing to Thanksgiving if I get it completed. My husband is crossing his fingers that somehow I do NOT find the time to make this, I'm sure.

So, so far these have all been yarn crafts. I also have a sewing project or two in the works.

I'm planning a Bricks and Cobblestones quilt to keep for my very own!

And for Project Linus, I have the bugs and flower-themed string quilt that has been in neglected for too long.

I love Martha's fleece hat patterns (more here) and have plans (and fleece) to make several for our local school district's hat and coat drive. I love the jester hat with pompoms and I think kids will too!

And gifts that aren't in jars will most likely be getting wrapped up in these adorable, reusable ribbon-tied bags. And they're so easy, just two fat quarters!

I will NOT be making my holiday cards this year because last year I totally burned my fingers to a deep char with the iron and glue gun making a bajillion cards for a cards swap! But I probably will be wrapping a few jars of homemade mixes for gifts and I love this cute look!

I make a cross-stitch ornament every year (the picture is of last year's) and Pip Stitch clued me in to a great resource for patterns for free! The Christmas Ornament Stitch-A-Long blog has tons of great patterns and pictures from those participating. I really like this tree but I also like this sheep (PDF). Maybe if I start early, I can do both!

And I have two lovely cats to make silhouettes for as a wedding present for my friend. I learned silhouette cutting from my mom who used to do it at our school fairs. Here's a really nifty tutorial for making silhouettes from photos, which is what I am doing with the cats.

And finally, I've been wanting some new earrings and when I have beads and wire sitting in my studio, I can't imagine paying for them at a store! I really like these hammered wire ones (PDF), I bet they're very swingy!

Caution-Halloween in progress

This month I have slowly been putting out more and more Halloween. I'm taking it slow, letting things develop as I go. And I want to spread out my posts about the Halloween decorations this month as well. So here are some in-progress shots to whet your appetite.
This cat is a cutie from Mom. She had a booth at craft fairs for a while, selling paintings and wooden things that Dad had cut out and she painted. This cat is too sweet!

Another cutie, this bat was a Target find last year. Isn't his little smile cute?

Here is the front porch in progress. It consists of branches (painted black) in planters behind the bench and strewn with cobwebs, pumpkins and gourds, my skeleton wreath and a light-up spiderweb on the window. I have more to add too! Can you see my two big helpers in the doorway?

And here are more of those pumpkins and gourds, this time on the dining table. They aren't arranged the way I want yet, some will stay here and some will go on the buffet. These are all from my garden, from seeds I have saved over the years. I love gourds!

I submitted this post to Tip Junkie's Talk to me Tuesday. I love that blog!