My four recent Halloween crafts

Have you guys been working on any Halloween craft projects lately? I've been pretty busy cutting, spraying, and gluing the past few weeks. This first project was a quick one, but I love the effect. I bought a pack of 8 little rubber snakes from Dollar Tree and spray-painted them gold. That simple, and I love them!

These squiggly little gold snakes will make nice table scatters on the black tablecloth for the party. I could also imagine that they'd make a neat addition to a Cleopatra or Medusa costume.

Dollar Tree is selling their classic foam pumpkins again, but this year a helpful change has been made to them. See that crease on the side of the pumpkin? The pumpkin is made from two foam halves put together. The mold used to fit together in a way where the line ran horizontally around the middle of the pumpkin. If you were trying to craft with these in the past, you'll know what I mean because it was an issue!

Now with the line going down the side instead, there's nothing to interfere with the design on the front of the pumpkin. So, good job Dollar Tree!

These little pumpkins are carvable. So I drew a face with a pencil and then cut it out with a craft knife. You know one of those knives where you can knock out the blade and there are a bunch of blades behind it? I just looked that up "utility knives" with retractable or snap-off blades. They're super cheap. In fact they're three for $1.00 at Dollar Tree! Can't beat that.

So the knife worked great. I had to score over my design a few times, but since the pumpkin was hollow, the pieces popped right out. I cut that hole in the bottom so I could place this over a candle.

I wanted to go for a vintage vibe, like those old paper mache pumpkins. So I drew some eyes and a smile on paper and taped those inside the cut-out parts. It was a little challenging getting them in there, but I managed.

Lit up, this doesn't look all that different from a real pumpkin! Especially, if I took out the paper inserts. Even the parts of foam that were roughly cut look like pumpkin goop.

I plan to put this little jack-o-lantern on the porch for The Witch Party.

I was really excited to work on this next project! This little wood house was a birthday gift. There's a small light inside that is very bright and changes colors rapidly.

Using some old photos I'd collected of Victorian houses for reference, I painted the little house.

I added a little fence and some pumpkins outside the front door.

Here's the house sitting in a dimly lit room, with its lights on.

This little house gives quite the light show. Here with the lights out, I'll show you most of the colors the lights change to. Any favorites? It becomes kind of a sinister looking house if you use your imagination. I'm reminded of that spoof The Simpsons did years back of The Amityville Horror. Remember the end, when all those colored lights are shooting out of the house?

The last project I worked on was a new hat band for my witch hat. I wanted to do something really bright and fun this time. This year, what's inspired me most in the stores is the Day of the Dead stuff. So I was thinking about the Catrinas you see with the floral headbands.

Each of these bunches of flowers came from Dollar Tree. As it turned out, I only needed five of them. They're super big! I hot glued the flowers to a piece of ribbon and tied it around the hat.

I had the perfect hat model.

The back:

A close-up of the ribbon:

A fun surprise for me was that this ribbon glows in the dark, all the white parts anyway. I realized this when I carried the hat into a dark room and got to see some glowing skeletons.

Something neat about having leftover flowers is that I got to use them in a Halloween floral arrangement. I'll get pics of that arrangement when I have it out for The Witch Party.

Also, I wanted to be sure to share the new Halloween stamps available at the post office! At least I hope they're still available for all of you. I'm not sure how fast they'll move.

I was really excited about these, in part because these are the first purely Halloween stamps we've ever had! The closest we'd come to Halloween stamps were those classic movie monster stamps in the 90s. So yay! These looked great on the Witch Party invite envelopes.

Speaking of The Witch Party, that's coming up this Saturday! So I'll have pictures to share soon.

And I'd also like to do the Halloween Blog Party again this year! So, if you'd like to be a part of that, just send me of a costumed photo of yourself from any time in your life. You can email it here: justineshalloween@gmail.com or to the regular email where you write me. I plan to put up the party post on the weekend before Halloween.

A little extra Halloween in Cedarburg

With all that was going on this Halloween, I just now had the chance to update my blog with pictures from our annual trip to Cedarburg! I felt just a little bit warmer looking at these photos, as it's snowing already around here.

Isn't this little skeleton witch cute? She was one of several figures standing out in front of shops and buildings. We managed to get to Cedarburg the day before Halloween. If we'd been there on Halloween night, we would have seen lots of lit pumpkins out for the pumpkin walk. I haven't experienced that yet, but it sounds pretty cool. People come out dressed in costume and walk in a parade down the street at night. They bring jack-o-lanterns to light the streets. I'm sure the historic buildings, many built in the late 1800s, look magical lit by the jack-o-lanterns on Halloween night.

I always have to get some photos of the old mills along the creek. A few trees still had their leaves.

A close-up of the waterfall:

Colorful vines cover the buildings. You can see a glimpse of a scarecrow in the window that you'll see again later on.

So pretty and leathery.

This scarecrow looked kind of worried. I don't think the crows have anything to fear from him.

Check out the coffee cup carving on that pumpkin in front. Perfect for outside a coffee shop!
 

Me sitting in an old school desk outside a consignment shop:

A cute sailor scarecrow rowing a boat:

I love the texture in this photo. The rough old brick, the flaking paint on the wood, and that warty gourd. Three kind of crusty things alone, but I really like them together.

There were lots of different gourds to see:

I don't think I'd ever seen a pumpkin like this in person:

I think I saw a painted gourd kitty like this in a magazine this year.

Isn't this an inviting, happy house? It's like something out of a storybook. This old house now serves as a gift shop, like most of the other structures on this main street.

You can see a metal gazebo type thing to the left of the house. They deck this out with all kinds of Halloween decorations. A few of them:

 

Behind this shop is a shed full of sale goodies. I love going in here. It's old, creaky, and mildly spooky with the Halloween stuff outside.

This is the view looking back out the door from inside. Looking at this picture, I feel like I'm there again.

There were lots of metal sculptures sprinkled through the yard, like this dragon:

I saw some other garden sculptures, some silly and some scary.

An evil monk?

A giant straw crow:

A cool pumpkin person that stood outside a law office:

You might remember another paper mache sculpture that stood out there last year.

This guy was sitting outside a coffee shop. How about those coffee cup lid eyes? He's holding a bag of coffee beans.

I'm sitting outside one of my favorite shops in Cedarburg here. There are tons of holiday items in this Victorian house! Every room has a different holiday theme. Much of the downstairs area had Halloween stuff, but upstairs were little rooms with Christmas, Easter, St. Patrick's Day, and Fourth of July themes. It looks really cool when an entire room has the same holiday color scheme with a bunch of little critters and decorations sitting around.

There were a bunch of witch hats standing around on stakes in the yard.

This is part of what was going on on the porch. I just now noticed those cool, glittery witch boots! I guess there was so much happening decoration-wise, that I missed a few things.

A pile of bones in the yard:

I was surprised that I found this skeletal, hanging spider as creepy as I did. I was creeped out imagining it crawling around.

Inside the shop were countless cool things. Here are few:

Halloween corn! This would be cool to serve for a Halloween movie night.

Out behind the shop, I found this skull. At first I thought this was made from old rotting wood. On second glance, I think this made from old rotting skull.

I spotted a ton of pumpkins in the backyard of the next door building. My guess is that this collection of jack-o-lanterns was being saved to go out for Halloween night.

Wait until you guys see these caramel apples! I want one right now. Dripping chocolate spider apples:

I like taking pictures in shop windows, especially when I get a reflection of the surrounding buildings. Check out that gummy worm apple up top.

This building has served as a movie theater since 1936. I saw some neat old photos of it in a historical Cedarburg book a few days ago. I don't know if you guys have seen books like this about places where you live, but there are a bunch in our Barnes & Noble. The books are part of the "Images of America" series. I just looked on Amazon and it appears that there are books in the series about lots of American towns. It's fascinating to see the old photos. You might just be surprised to learn what a building you're familiar with now was once used for.

A brief history of the Rivoli building:

http://rivoliofcedarburg.com/about/

I love these decorative kale plants we saw outside the shops!

The Washington House is another historic building that appears in the Cedarburg (Images of America) book. It's now a bed and breakfast. If you'd like to see more of what the Washington House looks like now, here's the B&B's web site:

http://www.washingtonhouseinn.com/

Look at that beautiful metalwork!

The Washington House was Cedarburg's first inn and was founded in 1846. Wisconsin was founded as a state in 1848. It's amazing to think that this building was built before the state it exists in now was even official.

This is the Schroeder House, another bed and breakfast. There's some information about it on the Washington House site I linked to above. I love that one pumpkin on the fence.

There were lots of scarecrows in The Old Woolen Mill/The Shops of the Cedar Creek Settlement. The mill now houses a bunch of shops and is rumored to be haunted. These scarecrows weren't the standard kind you see. They had long necks, twisted faces, and crow heads. They were unique and some were kind of scary.

A witch scarecrow that I think would look scary at night.

A twisted grin:

This is the scarecrow you saw from behind in that earlier photo of the window.

A crow scarecrow. There's something kind of funny about that.

I didn't think I was sitting on that scarecrow at the time...

I hope you enjoyed this virtual trip to Cedarburg!