Happy Halloween and seasonal crafts

Happy Halloween everyone!  In our neighborhood we have trick or treating on Halloween this year, so tonight’s the night!   We carved our pumpkins this weekend.  They are all set!  For some reason we had 5 pumpkins instead of the standard 4, so I got to carve 2 of them.  I did the laying down one because it just kept falling over.

I wanted to show you my decorations too, because I think they are probably my favorite – even better than my Christmas decorations!

It’s a collection of things we bought, but a lot of this is things we’ve made.  I LOVE crafts.  I feel very accomplished when I look at them, but they also hold a lot of good memories of making them.  One of my hobbies that I spend a bit of time on in the fall/winter months is scrapbooking. I do digital scrapbooking, and make albums of the places we’ve visited.  This year I also have a special project going on that I will tell you about another day.  It’s a BIG project.

Up on my mantle are the SPOOKY blocks that I made.  Super simple project – paint wood, print paper, adhere with Mod Podge.    The great thing about Halloween decorating is that you can pretty much spray paint anything black and it’s a decoration!  So next I have the picture of a tree and bats.  Yep, painted frame and printed off picture.  Again, super simple thrifty decoration.

The board near the end actually required my Photoshop skills and digital scrapbooking skills.  I put the poster together, had it printed on heavy quality display vinyl, and then mounted it on that board.  Not sure where I got the idea from, but I’m pretty sure it was from Pinterest!

At the far end of the mantle is the scrapbooking paper pumpkin I made years ago with Sydney.

Down on the seat is two fun pillows I made.  A fun use of black and white t-shirts!  That black cat is my favorite decoration.  Oh, and that’s the clock Sydney made in her Industrial Tech class (that’s “shop” for anyone my age.  haha!!).

I’m probably just going to leave this stuff up until Thanksgiving because that’s when we decorate for Christmas.  We only have a couple of outdoor Halloween decorations, but I would love to get some orange lights.  They look so pretty!  We did buy a smoke machine this summer at a garage sale.  I think it was $1.  We will soon find out if it was a dollar well spent!!

Here is the extent of my Thanksgiving decorations – turkeys!  Another fun craft the whole family did (we each made one).  Oh, and I made those pumpkins a long time ago.  Unfortunately my cat can sense the turkey’s existance from a mile away and attacks them when I put them out for display so they will have to go high on a shelf to protect them!

And finally, here is a project we do every year as a way to enjoy some of the fall foliage even after the trees are bare.

Did you notice the one where I got creative and put some brown and orange crayons in it to hold it together like glue??  The brown crayon smeared all over my iron. It was not a pretty sight.

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Q:  Do you decorate for Halloween?  Indoors and/or outdoors too?

Q:  When do you decorate for Christmas?

My friend told me she was putting up her tree next weekend.  Sorry, not for me! I think Thanksgiving needs it’s share of attention first.

Q:  Do you have any Thanksgiving decorations?

Q:  Did you take “shop” in school?  

I did.  I took “shop” and “home economics” where we cooked food.  I loved both classes!