Creative Samhain

It's Halloween, aka Samhain, tomorrow!! I wish daylight savings time had ended last Sunday like it used to. But don't get me started on the "I Hate Daylight Savings Time" rant....Anyways, over the years we've started to amass a pretty large amount of Halloween decorations. We've scaled back the last couple of years because Sagan's just a bit too, um, "enthusiastic" yet for us to trust him around the Halloween tree w/ decorations & lights or the little Halloween village that has houses and characters that are reminiscent of a Tim Burton movie.

Once I learned how to cross stitch about 7 years ago, I realized a whole new world had opened to me in the decorations-department. My fave kits are from the Mill Hill Company, because they offer beaded cross stitch kits, like the one below. The 2 pumpkins and the witch are actually pretty ceramic buttons. The ghosts are done in white beads and the house is a mix of stitched beads and floss. I just finished a wicked cool Thanksgiving-themed beaded cross stitch and I'll post that next month. Click on the picture and you can really see the beads! I had to have this pattern when I saw it in the catalog. Fortunately, I did not have to stitch all that black; Aida cross stitch cloth comes in black, white & ecru. All I had to do was stitch the design. Even the black part of the witch is just the black cloth. I kind of fucked up the count on the moon so it's not quite round....by the time I realized my mistake, it was too late to rip out what I'd done, so I fudged it.

This is also a cross stitch that is one of my faves and I had a lot of fun with all the pretty colours. The most tedious part of this pattern was stitching the 8 skulls on the bottom.

Moving on to the Food Arts section of our program, isn't this a hoot? I saw the recipe in a magazine for "Ghosts in the Graveyard", sponsored by Cool Whip. I used to make this for Brian to bring in to his job on Halloween every year, both in California and Washington. Brian was the genius who solved my ghost problem. I don't have a pastry or icing bag, and Brian told me to cut the corner out of a baggie and use that. Brilliant. Snaps for Brian! Email me if you want the recipe; it's really easy and quick. And it tastes gooooooood too.

Before anyone raves over my pumpkin-carving skills, let me just say that if you own one of those carving pattern kits, you absolutely cannot screw up a pumpkin. This pattern, "Scream" was in the kit. The kids really seem to like this one as it always got the most comments.I've done a design from the kit for years, but apparently none of the photos I shot came out good because while I remember shooting them, hardly any made it into my photo albums. This one I did in 1997, when "The X-Files" was super popular. I found the logo and kept blowing it up on the copy machine till it was large enough to trace onto the pumpkin with the tools from the kit.

OOooooo....trippy and scaaaarrryyyyyy...... The large glowing triangular thing is our purple lava lamp in all it's gooey purple glory. Then the X-Files pumpkin, and then the purpley thing is a Van de Graff electricity ball. I'm sure you've all seen them, they shoot coloured lightning out of a ball in the center, but when you touch the outside of the glass globe, the lightning jumps to the tips of your fingers.

Have a Happy and Safe Halloween Everyone!!