Finally decorating for Halloween!

My first blog post!  It seems so incredibly self-indulgent, but whatever.  I’m sure there are cats with blogs that will have more readers than me, and I’m ok with that – mostly I just enjoy writing and sharing my random knowledge. And I do think I have a lot of random knowledge, primarily because if I don’t know something, I try to remedy that as soon as possible.

My blog doesn’t really have a theme – the only things tying my posts together will be that they all are things that interest me or that I think I have some sort of knowledge about.  And when I say knowledge, I don’t mean in any professional or expert sense.  Anything posted here will be my thoughts and opinions only, so keep that in mind.  If you decide that my way to do something works for you, enjoy.

I anticipate having posts about organizing and crafting – because I love to organize and I think I’m pretty good at it, and because every now and then I feel crafty (even if I’m not super good at it).  There may be other random topics too – who knows what the future will bring?  Can’t you just taste the anticipation?

SO for this first post – I think I’ll just ramble on about the decorations I put out for Halloween. In the past I would follow a fairly strict (self-imposed) decorating timeline:  Christmas gets 4 weeks (as the boss of all other holidays), Halloween gets 2 – 3 weeks, Easter 2 weeks max, and then all others (Thanksgiving, Independence Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.) get 1 week.  I still refuse to extend that timeline but now that I’m working, the holidays don’t always get their full time allowance.   Thus, today, 5 days before Halloween, I finally put out my crap.

I used to have SO much stuff – but as the kids get older (and I get lazier) I have purged.  Now I’m down to the table by the front door and the tv stand as the two areas that get decorated.  The only exception is, of course, Christmas, because of the tree and the Lego winter village... but basically if it doesn’t fit in those two spots, it’s not going out.  (Ooh, wreaths & wall-decorations excepted of course, but I’m really cutting down on wall-hangings).

So what do I have out this year?  Under the TV I have some pumpkins – gold ceramic ones, wooden ones, and some nice plastic ones.  I like the pumpkins under the TV because they can stay there until Thanksgiving... it’s more “autumn” than Halloween.

On the entryway table, I have a fairly cheesy tree with mini-ornaments (the first to go if I ever find something I like better), a wooden owl that used to be a wall-hanging (but I found an extra tall ornament stand for it), a wine glass full of spiders, a box full of eyeballs, and some bottles of potions. 

I really enjoy the glass-o-spiders.  I took a plastic wine glass that had gotten all “crackly” in the dishwasher and filled it with “table confetti” from the Target dollar spot.  It was cheap and I think it looks pretty neat.  

The potion bottles – one is an old tequila bottle, one’s from vodka, and one’s from spaghetti sauce.  I removed the labels with Goo-Gone (best product ever) and attached labels I had downloaded from the internet.  I’d love to give credit to whoever designed them, but I don’t remember (I made them last year before I even considered blogging).  I printed them on sticky-backed paper and cut them out with my Silhouette, so that was extremely easy.  The “elixir of arachnid” has little plastic spiders in there (I need to add more, but I didn't get a chance to run to Target yet), the eye of newt has plastic eyeballs, and the “Potions” is just water with a drop of black food coloring.

The box of eyeballs is a craft I’m super proud of.  I saw the saying on Pinterest, on just a block of wood or in a frame or something.  I found the box at Hobby Lobby, already painted black, and decided to use that as my “canvas.”  I cut the letters out with my Silhouette, but didn’t like the way the vinyl looked on the box.  Instead I used the stencil left behind by the letters, put it on the box, painted the letters with silver paint, and then removed the vinyl stencil.  I’m so pleased with the way it turned out!

Ok well there you go – my first ever blog post.   Happy (almost) Halloween!