The last of my pumpkins!

The first two pumpkins that I carved for our party molded like crazy and I threw them away on the Monday before Halloween. I liked the haunted house enough (plus it went nicely with my graveyard!), so I recarved that.

Here's what it looks like lit up. You can kind of see the ghosts that projected on the wall. I still don't think I got that part quite right, but oh well!




And here's my favorite for this year. Since we had so many little kids last year, I wanted to make a more kid friendly design. I chose Abby Cadabby from Sesame Street. Pyper loves her and I thought the design was cute (though I'll admit that I thought it looked like an easier design. Ummm...not so much!)

Happy Halloween, everyone! :)

Here's a project I did with the kiddos that I nanny for today. Isn't it cuuute?

Halloween party, part 4: Dining room decorations!

And last, but not least, the dining room!


Shhh...don't pay attention to the fact that I made two left hands. Oops!



I didn't have time to paint these, but I thought they looked ok as they were. Closeups of completed skeleton sconces:






There were also mice hiding on the stairs leading up to my sewing room (though they were a bit hard to capture in pictures):


And my favorite, bats in the greenhouse! (Unfortunately, we didn't think about the fact that there aren't lights in the greenhouse, so once the sun went down, no one could see them. Oops!)

Halloween party, part 3: Living room decorations!

An overall shot of our fireplace wall. Here's the right side of the fireplace:


Aaaand the left:


The candelabras, wreath, tiny skeleton hands, little stuffed ghost and gargoyles are all store bought. I made the little garland over the fireplace.

There are also some little mice running around in the bookcase. Can't see them? Let me zoom in a little:


There's even a little mouse hiding out at the base of one of the walls, welcoming our guests into the dining room. :)


We also had some little bats hiding out in our lamps!

Halloween party, part 2: Pumpkins!

Pumpkins. I already posted the haunted house one...which I ended up putting out on a pedestal in the graveyard. The second pumpkin was a ghost ship and it was a giant pain in the butt.



We had tons of problems getting the lid off and it took forever to scrape the insides because the walls were so thick. They actually needed to be thinned down even more so that you could see the light from inside better, but it's already starting to mold (in spite of lots of lysol), so I think it'd be a lost cause at this point. Oh well.



I also think that if I try this again, I'll use transfer paper to map the design. I had so many holes poked that I couldn't tell what I was carving, so it took far longer than it should've. Oh well...

Also, there are supposed to be full cut out sections of the water and parts of the ship, but I just didn't have the patience to deal with it.

Carving and shading pumpkins is definitely more time consuming, but I don't think it's really as difficult as it seems. It's all about having the right tools. Would anyone be interested in a little tutorial?

Halloween party pictures: part 1!

I think I'm going to split up my pictures from our Halloween party (which was Saturday), or I might drive you all insane. ;)

Let's start outside with my little graveyard:






These are all based on the graveyard that surrounds the Haunted Mansion at Disneyworld. I love them so. :)

Close ups:










P.S. The little ghost heads are from the dollar store. They blink different colored lights, you just can't see it in the pics.

Getting ready for our Halloween party!

The tombstones are waiting to be set up....I hand carved and painted these last year. More info about them here and here



and I have one pumpkin mostly carved. It will also get some ghosts cut out in the back that will project up onto the house, but I'm going to wait till tomorrow to do that. I also need to smooth this out some if I get time:

Skeleton hands: Part 2

Last night, I worked on the second stage of the hands.



I coated the "joints" with the adhesive, then wrapped them in cotton, coated them again and molded the resulting putty to make them look a bit more like they're supposed to.


A note: This is certainly not a project if you don't like getting messy. My hands were covered in glue and cotton and I had to wash them off twice so that I could finish.









Don't they look creeepy? ;) They feel really weird too. As they're drying, the adhesive starts to feel cool and clammy. Ick! :P

I think I'll probably work a little more with some details on these and then paint them and attach them to the sconces. Wheee!

Creative Monday: Halloween Decorations

This week's project (still in progress):



In progress:







Here's the tutorial I'm using:
http://www.hauntershangout.com/home/corpsehands.asp

and I'm trying to recreate my own version of these, found in the Haunted Mansion:
(photo from doombuggies.com, if anyone's interested. It's an awesome site!)

Creative Monday: Kit time!

My momma sent me this little kit that she found at Michael's and I just had to put it together.

Here's the kit (glue and scissors not included):


And here it is all finished:


Although I think I like him better without the bow:


Ooo, and as long as I'm discussing Halloween things...how cool are these paper mache pumpkins? (fair warning, there's a finger injury in that tutorial, so if you see a bandaged finger and are squeamish, don't go any further!)

Creative Monday: Halloween edition!

We're having a big Halloween party again. So much fun! :) My general theme is based off of Disney's Haunted Mansion, but I like some general little stuff too...soooo, I made a little bat garland from tissue paper (an idea I saw on the Martha Stewart site)



It's easy enough to do. I just drew a little bat and then traced him onto the tissue paper (that was already prefolded. I used pencil so that I could see what I was doing, and my tiny embroidery scissors to make the tiny cuts. Each strand is about 5 bats long and then I just taped them together.