A Happy 2013 to you! Thanks for a fun 2012!

Happy New Year everyone! I've recently come across a few New Year's related videos and projects that I'd like to share with you. I hope you'll enjoy these, learn a little something, and maybe even do some crafting.

But first, I have to thank Becca from Magikal Seasons for the wonderful prize I received in the mail today. That in itself put me in a happy mood for the new year! Here's my prize, Frozen Jack:

As you can see, Jack is a frozen pumpkin, covered in glittering snow. He has that howling, shivery thing going on that we probably all have in January. I just love him, and I think he looks great on my pink Christmas tree! Thank you so much Becca. This is the perfect winter gift for a Halloween nut like me. You'll want to see the rest of Becca's creations, which are in her Etsy shop:

Becca's Seasons Art Etsy Shop

She has pumpkins, skulls, Bigfoot, the yeti, and all kinds of cool things going on there!
 
Onto the New Year's trivia! The other day, I caught an episode of Burt Wolf's Travels and Traditions. If you've never seen the show before, it involves the host Burt Wolf acting as a luxury tour guide and teaching you about the history of food and ceremony. The episode I watched was about New Year's traditions. Here are a few clips from that show. I bet you'll learn a little something new from these!



I wonder how many people are "fully awake and clear headed" when midnight rolls around?



It's interesting to think about celebrating the new year in spring instead of winter. I can definitely see why this was the original plan for some people. New growth and more sunshine helps to make people feel hopeful each spring, like something new is beginning. Still, I can see something positive in celebrating a new year so soon after Christmas. It's something else to get excited about after the Christmas celebrations have ended. I found the part about the God, Janus very interesting too!

There's Janus, facing both the past and the future. He's the perfect symbol for New Year's Eve.

I'd like to have a nice New Year's hat this year. So I plan to try creating my own. For anyone else who'd like to get hat making along with me, here are some tutorials that might help you! The girl in this first video is one of the more fun and funky crafters I've run across on YouTube:

OK, I just heard her use the term "fun and funky" herself. So I guess we're on the same page!

Some people also like wearing crowns or tiaras for New Year's. I found a clear and simple tutorial for that too. Even if the woman in this video was planning for Jubilee celebrations, I think these crowns would work fine for New Year's Eve. Like the last tutorial, there is a template included.



Mini top hats and crowns can come in handy for Halloween celebrations too. Just imagine these in an orange and black theme!

For any crafters out there who are looking for a last minute New Year's project, I found a page full of them! These projects mostly have a glittery, celestial theme:

51 DIY Ways To Throw The Best New Year's Party Ever

I hope you all have a fun New Year's Eve no matter how you decide to celebrate. As Burt Wolf said earlier, try to stay awake and level headed!

I wish you all a wonderful 2013 and I can't wait for another year of reading your fun, spooky posts. During the past year I have learned so much from your blogs and gotten to know many of you better. I've felt like our Halloween community has grown closer through 2012. So thank you for your friendship and all the entertainment you've provided!

Good luck in the coming year. I look forward to a 2013 filled with your creativity, photography, stories, reviews, and enthusiasm!

A Dash of Spooky Sweetness This Christmas

You see this lady who is generously giving out the full sized candy bars to the kids? Well, I feel like I've just been to her house! That's because recently I had the luck of winning what I view as an adult trick-or-treat bag! It had what many adults pick out of trick-or-treat candy: the chocolates.

Chris, otherwise known as The Frog Queen, was the generous blogger who sent me this package. You might be familiar with her and the outstanding cemetery she has built. She's the one who created the magnificent mausoleum and grieving angel you bloggers saw in October.

Here are some of the goodies she sent me:



The chocolates came packaged in this adorable skull bag:



So far I've only gotten into the little jack-o-lanterns and they're really good! This package has helped stretch my Halloween festivities into the Christmas season. I've been alternating eating these Halloween chocolates with Christmas chocolates.



Alternating between Christmas and Halloween candies has me thinking about stocking stuffers for people who like spooky things. I've run into several spooky chocolate ideas online lately. If you have a Halloween lover in your life, they'd probably enjoy these treats - even in December!

The first is this chocolate orange jack-o-lantern. You know those awesome chocolate oranges you whack and unwrap? Well, with the addition of a paper face, you have a jack-o-lantern. I always see (and eat) these chocolate oranges around Christmas, so they should be on the shelves.

This chocolate orange look and some how-to info can be found here: Red Ted Art's Blog

How cool are these chocolate skulls complete with walnut brains?

These wicked little creations are sold by Sparganum on Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/shop/sparganum

These black and orange candy canes aren't edible but they'd be a fun decoration on a gift or stocking. They are another item I found on Etsy and they can be found here: Chenille Candy Canes

I tried to find some actual candy canes that were black and orange, but none turned up!

One more Etsy shop that could provide some surprises in Christmas stockings is Vintage Confections. I love everything here, but here are a few of my favorites:

Eyeball Lollipops

Planet Lollipops ~ I know these aren't spooky, but they were too cool not to share!

A search for "black licorice cats" will produce many results! I found some for sale on the Candyality site and bags of Gustaf's Dutch Licorice Cats are available on Amazon.

Of course these spooky treats would look the most appropriate in a stocking like this:

Here's some good news! The creator of this stocking was nice enough to post a brief how-to if you'd like to create your own: Make your own skull stocking

There are a bazillion stocking templates online, if you'd like to print one out as a pattern. It sounds like she used one of those, sewed the two stocking halves together, and then glued her skulls on. I suppose you could glue the halves together too, if you didn't plan on putting much in the stocking.

Also ~ I want to mention that a lot of my blog friends are taking part in something called "Creepmas" this year. For those who haven't heard about this, it's a 13 day blogging event celebrating this festive time of year in a dark, spooky way. So you might see something along the lines of Creepmas cookies or how The Addams Family celebrates Christmas or even some ugly Creepmas sweaters!

To view the participating blogs, you can visit: http://creepmas.blogspot.com/ and look at the "participating creeps" on the right side of the page.

Close Encounters and a Clown ~ I'm Loving IT!

Some of you may find this hard to believe, but I just watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the first time! I'm not sure why I hadn't watched it yet, but the reason I watched it now is because I won the Collector's Edition of the movie from TheGreatWhiteDope, whose blog can be found here:

http://thegreatwhitedope.blogspot.com/

The DVD set would have been a generous prize in itself, but that's not all I received!

I also received a book titled The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 1/2 Anniversary Edition. Prior to opening this book, I knew absolutely nothing about Penny Arcade. So that was something else new for me!

My third gift was an I'm Loving IT t-shirt from http://tshirtbordello.com

For anyone who doesn't recognize the clown as Pennywise from Stephen King's IT...

I've actually never seen Stephen King's IT, which is odd since I've seen a lot of King's movies. I probably should watch IT, if I'm going to be wearing this t-shirt around. I did look up a few YouTube clips from the movie, but I couldn't get over Tim Curry being under all that clown makeup! Recognizing him was just making me laugh. You have to give Tim Curry credit for trying the many different looks we've seen him in!

Here I am modeling the shirt. I ended up with several similar photos, so I put them together to make my first gif!

While I was taking the photos above, I saw a runaway dog zip past the window. I ran outside to see if I could catch it and ran into a neighbor. She was asking me if I caught the dog, even though I was standing there alone. She was also saying various weird things about how "that dog better get caught before he's a splat on the highway", when she got distracted by my shirt. She was kind of looking at my eyes and then down at the shirt. Eyes. Shirt. Eyes. Shirt. She finally just stared at the clown and went "Uhh". So it's getting attention already!

Back to Close Encounters. I'm going to give you a few of my thoughts on the movie. I'll try to leave any spoilers out, on the off chance that I wasn't the last person on earth to see this!

I really enjoyed Close Encounters. Two things that struck me were the optimistic attitude behind the movie, and the slower pace in which it moved. I'm not really complaining about the pace, it's just that I think I'm used to the fast paced, action packed style of more modern alien movies. In a way, Close Encounters showed me a lot of what I expected from a Steven Spielberg film. I say that because the movie was supernatural and magical, but at no point did I feel threatened or fearful of what might happen. Close Encounters was surprisingly nonviolent for a movie involving aliens landing on earth.

The earth in this movie is a planet filled with people who are curious about the aliens and would rather communicate with them than kill them. In fact, I don't remember seeing one gun through this entire movie. There might have been one, I just don't remember it. The closest we got to any aggression was one cynical army officer who plans to spray people who get in the way of his mission with something that will put them to sleep for six hours. Even he is not remotely mean spirited.

Like another supernatural Spielberg project Poltergeist, the plot of Close Encounters involves a family with several children. Unlike the children in Poltergeist, who I found sweet or funny in a sassy sort of way, the kids in Close Encounters are a loud, bratty bunch of little gremlins.  I kept wishing the aliens would appear and somehow beam them up, except I didn't wish them on the aliens. Anyway, these children belong to our main character, Roy and his wife, Ronnie. Without spilling too much of the plot, Roy has an encounter with a UFO and is completely fascinated by the experience. His wife and kids, not so much. Although, in Ronnie's defense, it would be hard to be thrilled with the whole experience while your husband is acting like a nut.

Meanwhile, across town, a woman named Jillian is having her own experiences with the aliens. Her experiences are more scary than Roy's, as her son is abducted. You'll notice that the aliens chose to abduct the sweet, quiet child, and not the brats mentioned before. Here you'll see Jillian and her son Barry during the spooky abduction scene. 

I found Jillian to be really likeable. I kept thinking what a nice person she was, without realizing where I've seen her before! I didn't recognize her as Melinda Dillon, the woman who played another nice mom in one of my favorite movies: A Christmas Story.

Both Roy and Jillian start to see the same visions after their encounters with the aliens. This leads them together on an adventure to learn more and retrieve Jillian's son. I'll stop there and not reveal any more about the characters, in case some of you haven't seen this movie.  I do want to mention the alien's spacecraft, though. It was really beautiful. It was covered in blinking lights and made little musical noises which were a means of communication. The music reminded me a lot of that old game, Simon. Do you guys remember that game? You had to hit these big colored buttons to mimic the noise the machine just made. 

The game even kind of looked like a spaceship! 

I wanted to show you the Close Encounters spaceship in action, so you can see what I mean about the musical noise communication:

This DVD set included a disc full of extras. There was a making-of documentary that was really lengthy and full of interviews and trivia. A highlight of that for me was seeing the little boy, Barry as an adult. He had a lot of cute stories from his days as a four year old, working on this movie. 

Thank you TheGreatWhiteDope for this generous prize pack! I really enjoyed finally seeing this movie and weirding out my neighbor with my new t-shirt. This is a generous bunch of gifts, and believe me I had to work for them! TheGreatWhiteDope really puts together a challenge. I was actually proud of myself for being able to answer the questions necessary to win this!

I'm interested in hearing all of your thoughts on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stephen King's IT, The Simon Game, or whatever else relates to these prizes!

Close your door, lock and latch it, cause here comes Lizzie with her hatchet!

You might not be familiar with the rhyme in this post's title, but I bet you'll recognize the poem it comes from:

Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty one.

If you're wondering why I have Lizzie on my brain (that just sounds wrong) it's because of the very exciting package that arrived a few days ago! This package contained a gift bag full of prizes I won from my blog buddy Holly. She has a spooky blog over at Holly's Horror Land: http://hollyshorrorland.blogspot.com/.

From the gifts I was sent, it's clear that Holly really knows me! Hands down, my absolute favorite gift was the pair of earrings Holly made! They're a set of dangling, silver axes:

I love the way these little axes swing from side to side as I move my head. Check out this happy little photo accident! 

I guess I was moving my head slightly as I took this one. The axe earrings came in this adorable coffin box:

 
You can see a bit of my new skull scarf beneath the coffin. I was in a Keith Richards/pirate type mood when I found a couple of those scarves on ebay. Anyway, here's a photo of me wearing the axe earrings as well as an eyeball ring Holly made!

The ring is an evil eye, that sits on a cute little bow, and I like that it matches the color of my actual eyes.

That pink flower doesn't have anything to do with anything. I was just having fun playing dress-up for this little photo shoot.

Holly also made me this cute little skull hair clip:

It's clipped to my shirt here so you can see it. I have a lot of hair and it overtook the little clip in the photos. She also made me a witch hat clip, which you can see alongside the other prizes:

As you can see, Holly also sent me a Lady Gaga mini book, some pumpkin lip gloss, and a trick-or-treat load of candy! This all came in an orange and black polka dot bag. Opening this bag made me feel like it was Halloween and Christmas!

I can't wait to delve into the Lady Gaga book and learn more about one of my favorite singers! Here are a few pages from the book:

Holly plans to sell her homemade fashion accessories on Etsy. Here's her Etsy profile:

http://www.etsy.com/people/HollyHorrorshow

You can join Holly's Etsy circle from this page, and be updated as she adds her creations to the shop!

Now here's a treat for you: The Lizzie Borden themed episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The Older Sister:

This twisted episode will stay on your mind for a while... Even if you don't have the time to watch the full episode, at least watch the intro. It's funny as usual!

I'd also like to share an episode of Ghost Adventures. This video shows a paranormal investigation at the Lizzie Borden House. There are some silly parts to this, but I wanted to share it because 1) The tour guide is wearing my little axe earrings! and 2) I learned a few things from this. For instance, I had no idea that Lizzie was acquitted of the murders and inherited a pretty hefty sum of money from her dead parents.

There's also some explanation about the first double murder that took place in the Borden house. No, not the murder of Lizzie's parents. This murder happened in the same house several generations earlier!

I know this is kind of a long video (at 45 minutes) but it's worth watching to the end. There are some potential bombshells revealed by one of the psychics. If what is heavily implied here is true, Lizzie would have had reasons to go nuts. This visit to the Borden house is far more entertaining than most ghost shows I've watched. Usually, there's some mumbled EVP I can't even understand, but these are pretty clear. Even if you're skeptical of the whole episode, it's interesting to watch.

Have any of you visited The Borden House? It's now a bed and breakfast! Not like you'd catch me wanting to stay there...

On a somewhat lighter, prize related note, this is my favorite Lady Gaga song: Paparazzi! I feel the need to issue some sort of warning before you watch this. Not that you haven't watched more explicit things in horror movies, and not that you don't already know what you're getting with Lady Gaga. Still, some people in this video look dead in a glittery sort of way. That and there's some sauciness between her and what appears to be an 80's hair band. I always wonder why Lady Gaga chooses the images she does for her videos. Probably these images are the type that the paparazzi would try to capture of her.

Oh whatever. It's fun to sing along to. "We're plastic but we still have fun!" Thanks again Holly!

Some Rotters arrived in the mail today!

I was fortunate enough to win a generous prize from Dex who runs the AEIOU... and Sometimes Why blog. He's a funny guy, who writes about spooky topics. I recommend following him!

The fun part about winning Dex's contest was that I had no idea what I was going to win! There were many possible prizes offered, including a rock. 

The prize I won was a book titled Rotters by Daniel Kraus. It has an awesome graveyard on the cover, and from what I can tell, it's about grave robbing. Or cemeteries, anyway. I really look forward to reading this! 

There's a realistic, life sized fly printed on the book's cover. It fooled me a little at first!

Dex was also nice enough to send me an eyeball shaped goodie bag that was filled with treats. I received candy, and glow in the dark critters. It was a fun surprise!

Can you see this glowing ghoul's shadow in the next photo? I love those little spiders.

Hopefully the rain will cease by tomorrow, because there are a lot of Day of the Dead events going on around Milwaukee! I plan to take some photos to share with you guys, if I'm able to attend these events.

Please remember! You're all invited to my virtual Halloween party....

I've decided on October 27th for that. So, if you have any photos of yourself in costume, from any time in your life, please send them to:

contactartgirl@gmail.com 

I will add a link to your blog beneath your photo. I think the Halloween party will be an entertaining blog post! 

The winner of my giveaway and other contests to enter

Last week I advertised a contest to celebrate having 100 followers. Today I chose the winner from the antique cauldron I found at the estate sale:

 I reached in, and pulled out...

Congratulations Vain Glory Sinner! Just email me your address, and your candy art print will be on its way. By the way, if you guys aren't following Vain Glory Sinner's blog, you should go take a look. Her blog is a mixture of makeup, antiques, and Gothic goodness in general.

If I didn't pull your name out of the cauldron, there are still plenty of Halloween contests for you to enter. For instance, I just ran across the Trick or Tweet Halloween giveaway from http://aeiouwhy.blogspot.com/ This blogger is giving away lots of generous prizes! You also have the possibility of winning a rock. Hopefully it won't be a very large rock, because I can't imagine the shipping charges for that!

You won't win this specific rock, I just thought it was a fun picture. I found it on a web site called: http://www.allgoogly.com/ where, you guessed it, people post pictures of various things wearing googly eyes. But I digress...

My blog buddy LuLu is also holding a giveaway for a lovely Halloween crown she made! You have until Oct. 7th to try for that: LuLu's Spooky Crown Giveaway

Also, not to be missed is Raven Fae's giveaway for a set of Grandin Road Halloween Goblets! Raven was the blogger who sent me the lovely bottle labels. You only have until 9:00 CST tonight to try for these, so
get on over to her blog: Raven Fae's Goblet Giveaway

Of course, there's still the duct tape pumpkin contest that I mentioned last time. You have until November 1st to try for that. I'm starting to get some design ideas for that one...

Well, tomorrow is going to be a fun day in blog-land! Many bloggers will be participating in the zombie blog walk. I'll share some zombie thoughts tomorrow and post links to the other participating blogs!