Pre-Halloween Craft Party

On the weekend I had some friends over for an afternoon of Halloween cupcake-decorating and pumpkin painting (and an excuse for more gross punch) and an All Hallow's Read Secret Skeleton.

Having tested some cupcake designs earlier, I decided the best ones were the Owls and the Creepy-Crawlies, so I got the stuff for those and we started with those. Then we improvised, with extra help from a bag of lolly facial features.

First up, here's the punch. Another round of frog spawn punch...

...and a second go at eyeball punch. The colour wasn't as good on this eyeball one because I mixed in some juices and soft drinks with a less vibrant colour.

Then later the colour leached out of the black jelly at the bottom and turned it all disgusting. Plus the eyeballs were starting to disintegrate.

Secret Skeleton was fun. We had struggled with knowing appropriate age books for kids, but it seemed to go ok.

Then we started on the cupcakes. Owls and creepy-crawlies (including chocolate-coated sultana ants)

Then the moustaches and mouths came out!

Oh no! I ate a bug!

Early Christmas Special - Demon Rudolph.

And with the most mutated mouth award, demon zombie panda.

I wanted to try painting on pumpkins this year for a few reasons. One, as I mentioned in my introduction to this year's Halloween series, is having no desire to set fire to anything in my house. Also it isn't dark when trick-or-treaters come. Also, good carving pumpkins are not easy to get or cheap here. I carved a Queensland blue once and it was very hard physical labour. So I picked a pumpkin I like to eat, and we painted instead.

Can't wait to eat some pumpkin.

I blatantly copied mine from the colouring-in sheets I'd printed for the kids.

What a fun Halloween-y day! Although I think we all had severe sugar crashes.

High-Pressure Crafting - Wedding, Part One

Some people were surprised that I didn't DIY more stuff for my wedding, but I focused on trying to reduce stress for myself, and it was a good idea for my sanity. I would need to keep that for all the twirling I would be made to do.

I had the dresses designed and made by Sandie Bizys and her talented dressmaker Amy. I knew from the start I wanted something fifties, but I had less classy ideas than Sandie and we ended up with something far more elegant than I imagined. She suggested the idea of searching for old family stuff that could be incorporated into the dress. Most of what my family has kept is more twenties and involves a lot of jet and other dark things, but I did find these little Brussels lace birds that Mum bought years before we were born. She said she always thought of them as bluebirds of happiness.

So the birds went on my dress at the back.

She does a lovely dress with swallows around the bottom and I wanted to do something similar based on these birds for my bridesmaids. We talked a lot about hand-painting but in the end screenprinting was a much safer idea. As it was there were plenty of moments of panic and a number of trial runs.

But I think they turned out ok.

More on the wedding later!

Pinterest Progress - Button Pictures

All quiet from me on the blog lately - I've been getting married! More on that soon, but here's something from before that I hadn't published yet.

I have a large tin of buttons, as I may have mentioned previously. I want to use them up, but a lot of craft projects seem to require specific colours, often bright colours, and I don't have many of them. I have a lot of black, white and brown buttons. So one thing I found on Pinterest was button artworks.

So I had a look at the tutorial for the Button Elephant by bustedbutton and decided I would have a go at it.

I decided to make a badger, because I love badgers, and because it exactly suited the colours I have. I painted the background with acrylic paint and in rather more than the recommended "wash" that she does, but that's what I happened to have out at the time to paint some table-tennis-ball eyeballs (more on that in a future post).

Then I hot-glue-gunned away! It was pretty hard to do, especially because I had small areas of colour and not as many small buttons as I'd like, and because my glue gun left lots of trails of glue strands everywhere that had to be picked off. And I had to redo the eyes 3 times because they kept being in the wrong position or angle or something.

Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out and it was a very quick project.

The thing that baffles me is that I can use SO MANY buttons and the tin seems just as full. I will need to make a lot more button animal pictures. Anyone want one?