Button bouquets

Really Bad Kitty's Creations, include some Dog Gone really good things! Especially if you love crafts that include buttons.

These girls have got the knack for combining buttons into beautiful creations.

Check out these wedding bouquets. The bouquet that will never wilt. Now that's a clever idea don't you think?

Or how about a table topper that never needs water?

They come in several assorted color themes. One for every season.

Need a centerpiece for your Holiday dinner? This Winter Blue tree will quickly set the mood.

To see more beautiful button creations, by artists Brenda and Ariela, click here.

Halloween Centerpiece

For a haunting dining room centerpiece, place a green glittered skull ( T.J. Max for $7.00) on a bed of dried moss inside a large apothecary jar.

Cheese cloth dipped into a mixture of coffee crystals and water will turn it brown to look like old cob webs. I draped mine over a stack of books for added height.

For window treatments in the background, cheese cloth was stained black and large holes were torn for an aged appearance.

Fun Game for a Halloween Party

This game has become a favorite at our house during Halloween parties. We fill a large jar with candy and ask each guest to estimate how many pieces of candy are in the jar.

At the end of the party, we give a prize to the winner - usually a giant candy bar. We use the candy as party favors, or hand it out to Trick or Treaters.

Mad Scientist Specimen jars

My living room has been transformed for Halloween into the the laboratory of a Mad Scientist, Dr. E.Vil Genius to be precise.

I covered our furniture with old white sheets picked up from Goodwill.

Then I placed clusters of glass jars filled with pale colored water (food coloring), and various body parts throughout the room.

I've been collecting empty jars for years, scouring Goodwill and thrift stores for any glass that resembles apothecary jars. It's amazing what you can find discarded at second hand shops for not much money.

Above: a fake pair of teeth, complete with braces, and a set of vampire dentures sit next to a severed finger made from Fimo clay. An inexpensive growing hand is labeled as that of a 10 year old who got caught by an angry mother trying to take candy from the candy jar before Halloween. A plastic skeleton (purchased for $1.00) sits in an empty Rum bottle - a shrinking potion experiment gone awry.

Below: glowing gooey eyeballs (purchased from oriental trading) represent Werewolf eyes and will bring extra powers for seeing into the future. Plastic skeleton hands (Walmart) look like tiny Hob Goblin hands recovered from the deep forests of England.

In the jar below, I put a head of cauliflower to imitate a prisoner's brain (straight from Azkaban Solitary Confinement). I usually wait until a day or two before our party to place the cauliflower in the water so that it doesn't decompose too soon.

For jellyfish stingers, I made threads from my hot glue gun. Careful though, you could get stung, I mean burned!

A seed pod, or rubber snake works nicely for this jar filled with blue "pickled preservative."

To fill the large blue jar in the photo above, I'll trim the stems from a very large Fennel root to represent the "heart" that was removed from an unknown creature found in the Cascade Mountain Range (A.K.A. Big Foot). I've also set out plastic trays and surgery tools with a few rubber body parts. The body parts (ear and nose) were given to us by a "frustrated Dutch Artist" (Vincent Van Gogh). Witch Hazel and Hydrogen Peroxide bottles sit close by.

Turn off the lights, scatter lots of tea lights around and you are ready for a spooktacular Evening!

For a free copy of the labels I made for the Mad Scientist Specimen jars, Click Here and then download them to print on your home computer. They come complete with instructions for aging the paper and affixing them to the glass jars.

If you like the labels and would like to make a donation, click on the button below. Any amount is appreciated! Happy Halloween.

Does your Elementary School Celebrate Halloween?

I'm a little miffed today.

Our neighborhood Elementary school recently announced that Halloween celebrations will no longer be allowed during school hours. To me, this is soooo sad.

No more classroom parties.

No more Halloween parades through the hallways.

No more costume contests.

No more sharing with friends what each other will be wearing to Trick or Treat in.

No more fun.

It feels like the minority is making the rules for the majority, and we're losing something really fun and wonderful about childhood.

I'm curious. What rules about Halloween does your school have?

I really hope Valentines Day isn't the next Holiday on the chopping block...but it could be. It involves a Saint afterall.

If you have an opinion on this subject, leave a comment. Share or vent your thoughts. I'd love to hear them.

Halloween Bats

For spooky, easy, and inexpensive Halloween decorations, one my favorite things are black paper bats. Every year, I trace and cut paper bats, from black tag board or construction paper, and strategically place them throughout the house. My collection grows bigger as I add to it a little each year.

Martha Stewart has a great page with instructions and a template for making clothespin bats. These are great because you can attach them to light fixtures or whatever. I have done this craft at parties with kids and they love it.

Country Living Magazine also has a nice article on paper bats. Click here to view.

I like how their photo shows a flock of bats flock flying by the door. What a great idea.

For instructions on how to make Clothespin bats Click Here.

For the Martha Stewart Bat template, Click Here.

For the Country Living Bat template, Click Here.

For the Country Living Spooky home article, Click Here.

And finally, a cute little blog from Ann Marie features the bats from Country Living displayed inside her home. Click Here.

Mad Scientist Lab Hazard Symbols

Every Mad Scientist would have lots of hazardous things around his laboratory. Especially if he was trying to create a living monster like Frankenstein right?

If you are decorating your home for Halloween and using the Mad Scientist theme, why not place a few scary signs around to give it a dangerous laboratory feel?

Here are some Free PDF files for you to download and print.

1) Hazardous

2) Poisonous

3) Nuclear substances

4) Biochemical hazard

5) Danger. Danger. Danger.

If you would like to print these symbols for your lab, click here to download the PDF file.

Dogs and pacifiers

Here is an innocent looking photo of our 10 month old sleeping on the couch. Sound asleep. Quiet as a mouse. Dreaming peacefully away. Nothing too unusual. "So what?" you might ask.

Look closer and this is what you'll find. A little green goodie tucked tightly in her mouth.

How does she do that and sleep at the same time?

It reminds me of when my children were little and sucked on pacifiers all day long, pausing only to sniff them, or pull them out to talk. They never wanted to part with them.

That slobbery dirty green ball is our little dog's favorite thing in the world. She begs and whines several times a day for someone to take her outside and throw the ball. So several times a day we take her outside and throw the ball.

Throw the ball.

Throw the ball.

And throw the ball.

Until we can't stand it anymore.

Then, she brings it in the house and plays "pounce" with it under the chairs for the next few hours.

We thought it only fitting to give her a special "eyeball" this Halloween!

Do you have your Halloween Costume yet?

I have mine! I ordered it online this year (see resource below).

Even though the theme of our Halloween party is The Mad Scientist Dr. E. Vil Genius and his laboratory, my family is dressing as Greek God's and Godesses. Make sense of that!

Last year my son dressed up as a mad scientist. This year he wanted to be Zeus. He wanted us all to match his costume so we are going to be Grecians who are visiting the Mad Scientist in his lab. We've hired a roaming magician and he agreed to dress like the Mad Scientist for us, complete with a little mouse in his pocket!

I will be the Goddess Athena and here is what my costume and wig look like.

No, that isn't me in the photo...
But I wouldn't mind looking like either one of these models.

I paid under $35.00 (total) for both the costume and the wig. I think that's a really good price! I've also purchased glittery fake eyelashes from Walmart for $3.00. Click here for the online store where I made my purchase for the costume and wig.

Designing Halloween Invitations

Hosting a Halloween party is really a lot of fun and something our family does every couple of years. We start the prep and planning early in October, beginning with a party theme.

This year our theme is:

"The Lab" of Dr. E. Vil Genius and The All-Seeing Eye.

One of the first things we do is make the guest list and send invitations. We enjoy the process of designing our own invitations and this year I gave the project to my 16 year old daughter.

She started the invitations by making various sketches of possible designs. We liked this one which is a swirl of the words, "The Laboratory," radiating from a central eye. Initially, she drew it in pencil, then darkened it with black sharpie to create a high contrast illustration.

She scanned the sketch and saved it as a jpeg image. Next, she placed the jpeg into Adobe Illustrator and used the "auto trace and expand function" which converts the sketch into a vector based image and makes it easier to color and make alterations.

She repeated the process with the interior design of the swirl.

After the images are converted, she overlapped them and began to experiment with colors.

She emphasized the words, "The Lab."

Next, she experimented with colors.

She also enlarged the all-seeing eye.

The final design looks like this.

Next, I wrote the inside copy for the invitation. I had just received a "summons" myself for jury duty, so it influenced the copy I wrote!

We printed the invitations on grocery sacks cut to fit our laser printer. The color and texture of the recycled paper added an aged dimension similar to what you might find in an old, haunted laboratory.

We hand-cut squares of black paper and folded them into envelopes.

The final touch was a 1"x 1" eyeball sticker placed to seal the envelope shut.

We also printed out several large versions of the eye to hang throughout our house on the evening of the party.