...It's that Orange & Black time of the year again

Right, been a while due to having some travels, but it's October and that means everything comes in pumpkin-cinnamon spicy flavoured limited edition, wrapped in orange & black, yep, Halloween is on its way again!!!

So a quick couple of hollow-weenie things for you to have a look at on your Inter-web ventures---

 Monkey Cats Studio (Designer Laurie Hardin) has some lovely Halloween artworks, check out her blog, her stuff is really fabulous

http://lauriehardinsaccents.blogspot.co.uk/

Tonight I came upon another great resource, a whole website dedicated to Halloween

http://halloweenfuntime.com/home

Halloween Cheesecake

I recently got an email from a group I follow, The Public Domain Review asking for a volunteer for their social media and I thought I'd have a look at the job description---long story short; I began doing research on their website and found this fascinating book on what to wear at a costume party, amazeballs! (all online free to read), so gotta share that.

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/fancy-dresses-described-or-what-to-wear-at-fancy-balls-1887/

Magpie Costume

And if you haven't had enough Halloween yet, come on over to Pinterest and let me show you my many related boards, loads of ideas there.

https://www.pinterest.com/gabyell13/

Gabrielle's Pinterest Page

Happy Haunting on the Halloween web

Until next time!

Gx

8 Days...

I'm back...

Just in time for Halloween. This year I've got inspired to do a little crafting after finding something on eBay USA that I wouldn't buy because the postage & packing are so very expensive, it's a kind of faux vintage wooden blocks, like so:

I kept going back and looking at them & counting my funds & finding them sparce...so I decided to make my own version, like sew:

I am very pleased with how these turned out---I used cupcake boxes and filled them with dry beans to weight them down, picked up some letters & put them on the boxes then glued the boxes shut.  I painted the figures on Adobe & printed them off.  

Instead of wood I used 3 A4 printed images A4 sheets of orange sheet foam & white glue (cut with water). I painted the glue onto the foam & carefully placed the images onto the foam sheets. When they were dry I gave them a layer of the glue mix on the top (trickiest bit as you have to use a fairly dry brush so you don't smear the ink too badly, check out the "O", a bit of a problem with that image). 

When that dried, I cut the figures out of the foam & painted them a final time, making sure to get the edges so the paper won't eventually pull away from the foam.  

Final step was to glue the figures to the top of the cupcake boxes, scoring the bottoms of the figures so they formed a good join. I had to use some short bits of leftover orange foam to make the figures stand up straight et viola!

Now just waiting for you, Halloween!

Gabrielle x

Cinnamon Witches for Samhain (Halloween)

Did a little crafty project using a recipe from http://www.marthastewart.com/907577/cinnamon-bird-ornament to create a scented seasonal swag.  It's super simple to create, you only need a few things:

1 cup ground cinnamon

1/4 cup applesauce

Craft glue (Elmer's glue, PVC)

Put all the ingredients in a bowl and stir well, you will need a spatula to scrape the sides of the bowl.  

Add the glue a bit at a time until it becomes stiff and pliable at the same time, like this:

You will then need to knead it some and form into a ball & roll it out to about 1/4-1/2:

Using whatever cookie cutters (baking shapes), cut out the shapes, reform the off cuts, re-roll and cut more, keep repeating until there is no more cinnamon dough remaining. 

Using baking or wax paper on a flat surface lay the shapes

I was making quite a few and I used 3 different shapes, witch, cat and bat---Oh, and don't forget if you want these to hang you have to poke holes at the top of the shape

Allow them to dry, I'd put in a warm place as they took several days to dry just on the counter top.  Turn them over every six hours or so and you will notice that the side that was facing down will be sweating a bit or have a darker patch visible.  When you stop seeing that, you will know they are entirely dry.

I decided to kit a swag using some orange & black yarn (cotton), then after it was complete I hung the dried shapes on it and draped it on our mantle:

I also did some using gingerbread men cookie cutters and will string them up for Yule.

Happy Halloween All! 

file:///C:/Users/Marjorie%20Newson/Downloads/pinterest-e6721.html