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The only problem with Trick-or-Treaters is that Edith is very much aware of the open front door and she wants to know why that pumpkin gets to go outside when she doesn't.
By the way, the pumpkin has been styled by sitting it in the shards of a terracotta pot that was smashed when we had very high winds a couple of weeks ago. I was trying to make it look like the pumpkin had burst free.
One really good thing about buying your Halloween decorations on Halloween Eve is that everything is 50% off, and there isn't a lot of choice so you don't spend forever choosing what to buy! No really, that is a good thing!
We spent $10 on a big fluffy fake spider, fake spider-web, a plastic pumpkin-lamp and a big bowl for all the sweets. We already had some lights from last year which we've put in the bush by the porch. Then Doc C explained to me the finer points of purchasing chocolate for Halloween, it's a lot more complicated than I would have thought.
Plus it's already working! We've had two groups of Trick-or-Treaters, the first were actually two small boys with their mother and the second were a group of teenagers dressed as blood splattered Alice in Wonderland characters I think. So fun!
"Congratulations ******! You are the Winner of Project Runway!"
If you haven't seen any of season 8 of "Project Runway" this won't make any sense as a Halloween post; if you have been following it then you'll understand when I say that last night's finale was the stuff of nightmare.
One of those really depressing nightmares that looks like a dress from the winner's Fashion Week show. ahem.
These doorstep dummy thingies are too cute. I mean that, these are clearly meant to be adorable and it's making feel queasy.
And comedy ties are historically inaccurate on mummies.
grumble grumble grumble
All of the faculty in my department have cubbyholes for their messages and books.
This week it has also been the delivery method for several glittery skulls.
Today's batch of cookies are all headstones, and they came out very nicely - We ate all 13 of them within about twenty minutes.
I really like the headstone cookie cutter, because it's nice and simple but you can do fun decorating things with it, and it doesn't matter if some of the cookies have cracks in them because that just adds to the versimilitude.
As soon as these came off the baking tray I put on the seeds I'd just scraped out of the pumpkin I'm using to make risotto with this evening. Then I added some olive oil, salt and pepper and put those in the oven to roast. Then, when the pumpkin seeds were toasted, I swapped those for chickpeas because I'd just read a recipe suggesting that.
Doc C is loving this sudden burst of domestication, I'm even wearing an apron, but he is slightly concerned this might be some sort of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" slash "Stepford Wives" scenario.
I baked skull shaped cookies, and I decorated one as well. Of course I was aiming for it to look like a skull, but I think it looks more like a clown.
Which in many ways is even scarier. Particularly when you layer it with some spidery type things from Picnik's Halloween textures selection.
These ghost cookies were some of the first batch I've made this year, and I overcooked them, as I'm sure you can see. Good thing they were just for me and The Doc to snack on, so they were eaten immediately after I took this photo and went nicely with a strong cup of tea.
I follow a very simple recipe from Nigella Lawson's "How to Be a Domestic Goddess" but I add in a lot more spices. I used a quarter of the dough for ghosts and another quarter for skull cookies to be eaten this afternoon. I'll probably make the rest into gravestones and bats.
Pink sequin illuminated animatronic reindeer.
Christmas decorations on sale before the Halloween decorations have even come down.
The horror, the horror.
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(Actually, to be fair, I can imagine loving those reindeer in exactly the right context. However, for me, that would involve a level of delicious high camp with a liberal pinch of irony, and I don't think that was intended when these were created. They may also be to raise money for Breast Cancer Research, I'm not sure, which may mitigate the Barbie pink but not entirely excuse it.)
This evening we went to the Ghost Train and screamed and screamed and screamed.
It was fun!
As you can see I wore my Coraline costume and took Coraline Amigurumi with me.
I also brought a hat with me, just in case, which was good because my Coraline wig started to come off on the tilt-and-whirl.
I don't really understand why this nice old man dummy was in the Halloween section of K Mart, I think he looks rather sweet.
If he was carrying a tray in one hand and could actually hold drinks or snacks on it I would have bought him home to serve gin and tonics with nibbles; but as it is, he just has an electric candle and a very fake looking bird on his shoulder. So he'd really just be a big inconvenient dust trap for 11 months out of the year.
Probably my fondness for animatronic elderly butlers is based on a film I inexplicably loved as a teenager called "Ghost Chase". It's a very odd little film, and I have no clue who the intended audience was, but it does feature a Yoda like puppet that becomes possessed by the ghost of a butler as a major plot point.
Skull-in-a-Top-Hat on a stick! Wooo!
Please note that he is behind the Cat-Head-in-a-Clown-Hat on a stick, and in front of the Pumpkin-with-glittery-stalk.
My main question about Skull-in-a-Top-Hat is what are those things over his eye sockets meant to be? Eyebrows? Stitches? They just look really odd to me.
I also noticed when I was editing this photo on picnik that there is a tea light holder attached to the back of Cat-Head-in-a-Clown-Hat, which would indicate that these are all candle holders. This is very pleasing to me for some reason.
Laura and Randy had a Pumpkin Carving Dinner Party on Sunday - And this is My Little Bat! I based it on a pattern in one of the booklets that come with the carving tools.
Jill looked at it upside down, and said that the carving looked like a skull, which I love.
When we got home I put the pumpkin in our fridge to keep it fresh, and I intend to make a roast pumpkin risotto or soup maybe. Spooky yummy!
One-eyed clown cat head on a stick! Wooo!
In other news I am getting really sick of PCs in general and this laptop in particular.
Next time we are buying a MAC and that is freaking final.
Pumpkins have been carved.
And I have, retroactively, added my skull photo into today's post finally. All is right with October.
This is the vinyl patch I sewed onto Doc C's courier bag after he bought it on our first trip to Boston together, so it's been there for 6 years. I love the way it's aged through day-to-day use.
For some reason our Internet keeps conking out at home, not for long, but it's enough to mean that the post I thought was saved and ready to auto-publish whilst I was getting my hair cut has vanished.
Sorry about that.
Anyway, I seem to recall it being about the Rorsharch sticker that appeared on the back of the door in ladies' loos at work. Which I thought was just random enough to count as a Halloween post, especially considering Rorsharch would be a rocking Halloween costume, if only the mask could actually be made in real life.
Somehow I completely failed to go to the Coraline website until this week. How did I allow this to happen?
As you can see I have given the Green Queen black button eyes, and I think she looks really quite sinister. The Beldam must have an alien cousin, don't you think?
I've yet to make the buttons to go on my Coraline amigurumi, so what I might do is take a photo and then upload them to the Coraline website to try different buttons out before I get out the polymer clay.
I love spooky house silhouettes!
Actually I've been trying to find a less exaggerated version, that I could adapt to look more like an English country house, so that I could finally get round to making that "A Gift from MANDERLAY" t-shirt I want.
Now this Old Navy T-shirt is adult sized and I love the cat illustration, but it is still not perfect.
My complaints this time are:
Not to worry though, this is precisely why I took a photo; so I could play with the image in Picnic and put it on a nice dark red without any text at all. Lovely.
The graphic on this Old Navy Halloween t-shirt is so very sweet, but I wish it didn't have that annoying text.
Of course, then I'd wish it wasn't only available in children's sizes and only on white.
Plus do I really need any more t-shirts? No, no I really don't.
One thing I have never really understood is what Minnie even sees in Mickey. He's sort of squeaky and annoying to my mind, but at least he makes an effort to put on an actual skeleton suit.
Just adding a headband with feelers to it does not make your polka dot dress into a proper costume Minnie, that is very weak sauce.
This post is brought to you today by the letter M, and by Cultural Hegemony!
This mechanical pony ride sits outside Kmart, next to a kid size Bat-Mobile. I took this photo on the way in, and made some comment to Doc C about how spooked the horse looked. This isn't the first time I've noticed this particular toy, and I have always thought that it looked uninviting, because that horse looks evil and/or insane and I wouldn't want to put a child on it. Look at the expression on it's face! That is not a well balanced horse!
On our way out after our shopping there was a little girl riding the Pony of Darkness, and I recognised her as the child who had been systematically destroying an animatronic witch inside the shop. Maybe she was playing a rousing game of the Spanish Inquisition,.. or maybe she's just out of control. Either way, I can see why the horse looks like that now, clearly even devil spawn children demand pony rides occasionally.
Nancy's new favourite game is to walk along the beam in the living room, stop halfway along and give the chains hanging from the ceiling fan a bit of a chew. Well, I say chew, what she really does is scoop the chain into her mouth with her paw and then drop them. I have no idea why this is fun.
This just happens to be directly above the sofa, so if you happen to be sat there, watching "Mythbusters" for example, you are treated to quite the display of kitten cat ferocity.
Nancy is ridiculous.
I took Edith outside for a walk and this time I thought ahead and brought my iPod so I could listen to a podcast whilst Madam Floofy-Knickers enjoyed eating individual blades of grass and lolling around under a tree.
There is a great podcast of vintage radio dramas, which you can download free from the Relic Radio website or from iTunes, and I was listening to Strange Tale 36: "The Dummy". It's the predictable story that you can guess as soon as you hear the title, yes, yes, evil-ventriloquist-dummy-comes-to-life chaos ensues, but the really chilling part for me was the South African actor's attempt to do an Italian accent. shiver.
Later we nipped into KMart to buy a few things, and to examine their Halloween goodies. Amongst the masks was a rack full of Ventriloquist Dummy masks that actually were quite unsettling.
Particularly when I focused in on the eye, and saw the eyes of the mask behind it staring at me. Ok, now I am getting spooked by the whole dummy thing.
We happen to live in a place that's famously beautiful at this time of year, so much so that we actually get tourists who are referred to as "Leaf Lookers". This being a particularly nice day I was taking some photos of the late afternoon sun shining through the autumn leaves.
Then I spotted the newly spun spiders web catching the light, and looking very much like my beaded cardigan from yesterday. When you see a new web they look so delicate and pretty it seems ironic they are so intrinsically linked with haunted houses.
However, when I moved to try and get a better shot, I then saw the main web.
Oh right, well now that you mention it, that is really creepy.
This spider is beaded onto a cardigan that I have had for... um... 17 years? It was a birthday present from my lovely Mum, and I still find it delightfully shiny.
I came home from work about an hour early and went straight to bed. I woke up for dinner, and I intend to go back to bed shortly. So there is a possibility that I may have caught another damn bug.
Look, if you are ill, don't come into my office! I am sick of the germs! Ugh!
In other news I have been collecting the string from the twice daily campus mail delivery. I just hate throwing yarn away, even if it is pre-cut into random lengths. I had a whole drawer full of string, which had turned itself into a really big knot, so I spent some time this afternoon unravelling that knot (trust me it was the most useful way I could spend time this afternoon, I was so brain-dead). My plan is to crochet it into rug to put under my desk (I am assuming the string is State Property, so I want to use it to make something for the office obviously); I have one in mind that I really like and there is a free pattern for it on the Lion Brand Yarn website.
It's a crocheted (or knitted) to look like a patch of grass, which means it uses a lot of yarn; so it is perfect for a project which is recycling otherwise discarded string. I might even dye it green.
Night vision glitter skull! Woo!
This is a tray of fake rats.
They are covered in glitter in silver, lime green or dark grey.
I mention this because I noticed the caption on the lid of the tray only when I looked at the photos this evening.
Lime green glitter covered rats are so "realistic" that they "...will spook anyone"? Really? Is there a new breed of disco rats I have previously been unaware of? Fantastic!
I had another look at these shiny skulls when we went food shopping yesterday, and sadly they just look tacky without the benefit of being able to fiddle with the exposure and colour levels.
Isn't it a pity that you can't use Picnik in real life? These are so fabulous with just a soupcon of tweaking, which I will illustrate through the magic of a classic before-and-after shot.
I'm still mostly looking for things around the house I can take photos of whilst wrapped up in a chunky woolly sweater and drinking a huge cup of green tea.
Today's subject is my box of badges (American Translation: Buttons or Pins). As you can see a large number of my badges feature skulls, with or without crossbones.
We went out for breakfast this morning because I thought copious amounts of maple syrup would help me get well sooner. I'm still feeling bleurgh, but I'm a bit better.
We also had to do some shopping, and I insisted that we go to Lowes so I could take some photos of their Halloween section. I was practically asleep on my feet at this point, so Doc C wasn't keen but I knew I needed a photo for today's Countdown to Halloween. Well, the Halloween decorations at Lowes this year are pitiful, it was very disappointing.
Fortunately I also happened to take some glamour shots of Nancy looking out of the living room window. Usually the the sunlight bleaching all the colour out of her eyes would make this a bad photo of her; but for Halloween it's perfect. She looks like a stumpy little zombie-cat.
Isn't she adorable? Staring out of the window, lusting after squirrel brains.
Unfortunately on the first day of the Countdown to Halloween I'm at home with a cold, so I'm staying in bed with a good book and a mug of hot spiders.
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