Craft Confessions | WITCH'S LAIR (So excited for Halloween!)

I'm so excited for Halloween this year. The weather in Kansas City has been nice and chilly and crisp lately; I love it! In our new home, we have a little entry room before guests walk upstairs onto the main level of our home (check out some pictures below and you'll understand). We have a beautiful roll-top desk inhabiting this space because it is way too heavy to haul up our stairs, and because it makes a good drop-off place for our mail, umbrellas, motorcycle helmet, etc. I had tons of fun decorating the table by our front door last year (check it our here), and I couldn't resist the urge to do something similar but so much bigger with our entry desk this year!

Let me break this down for you. I have to give kudos out to all the great designers out on the interweb who did most of the heavy lifting for me. I just put their great ideas and creations together!

We have a small, skinny window that is usually covered by wooden shutters. I opened up the shutters and placed some trace paper over the window (so a soft, spooky glow will come out at night). Then I cut out a rat silhouette and glued it onto the paper. That ought to look good at night :). In the right picture, I have a lovely bouquet of dead leaves (stacked on some degloved Harry Potter goodness) and a jar of "bat skulls" (courtesy of Love Manor's amazing flickr page).

On the other side of the desk top, I've got a collection of ingredients for good witchy remedies. First we have a jar of berries and leaves, a bottle of snakes (label from Love Manor and rubber snake from The Dollar Store), and a little sign that says "Kick off your shoes and head on up". Granted, the sign isn't witchy at all, but the fonts and graphics match the lair's theme, so I left it up.  Behind the sign is a large candlestick (from my wedding centerpieces) and a dollar store candle that I made drippy with melted wax.

Across the mirror I draped a creepy looking cloth (also from the dollar store) and clipped a few witchy recipes on top (also printed from Love Manor). In the center of the desk top, I stuffed and labeled a brown paper bag (with an awesome free label from The Graphics Fairy- isn't she awesome?) and a candle I purposely melted on freezer paper.

On the writing level of the desk, I placed a few books covered with very spooky titles including "A Pocket Guide to Transfiguration". In the middle is an old college textbook of mine with a fake chapter on Cyanide (all text copied from Wikipedia) placed in the spine. These book covers and fake pages are created from scratch, but I've included them at the bottom of the post in case you'd like to use them!

On either side of the desk are awesome cubbies that I filled with more "utilitarian" items. The left side has paper bags, clothespins, mixing sticks, and a can of dead man's toes (with another label from Love Manor). On the right side are small glass jars filled with graveyard dust (dirt from the yard), witch hazel (a random plant from the yard), and blood (tomato juice).

I wanted the other corner of this tiny room to get some love, too. So I wrapped our monogram in a bit of spider web. (The picture on the left might help you understand the set-up of our house a little more.)

So here's where we started (the images on the left) and where we ended up. What do you think?

BOO!

Here are my sources:

Love Manor

Graphic Fairy

My book sleeves and cyanide pages (some images from The Graphics Fairy):

Craft Confessions | Halloween Decorations

Growing up, Halloween was always fun, but never very exciting compared to Thanksgiving or Christmas. Something happened in college--fun parties, perhaps--that completely changed my view, and now I'm a full-blown Halloween groupie. My love for the winter holidays hasn't decreased (I'm a December baby so of course I'll always like that month), I just get the added joy of eagerly looking forward to another holiday!

I've had these simple decorations up since the beginning of September, which was before I started this blog, so I didn't think to include pictures until now. The inspirations for my jar labels came from House of Smiths; if you haven't already checked out Shelley's blog a time or two, get on it! She has lots of inspiring tutorials for revamping old furniture and making a house a home. 

Here is what the whole package looks like next to our front door. This just also happens to be our drop-off zone for mail, so excuse the papers. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't wrestle enough with the blinds and lighting to find a good way to take this picture without a flash. So to give you a better view, I brought the displays up to my mini-studio. Here are the displays on the left. I purchased the mini skulls from Michael's, the "Goblin Droppings" are caramels on a bed of corn husks, and the candlestick is a reuse of an old chair. (If I get the time I'll show you how I got 14 very cute candlesticks from one $10 chair.)

This is the display on the right, nestled against our kitchen counter. The bottle is a fun treasure my husband had from the Scottish festival (it held root beer), the cool squash is called a patty-pan squash, and the framed art was a five-minute project. I free-handed a very crooked tree silhouette and traced a crow silhouette from a photograph, then layered it all on a piece of orange cardstock. This may be my favorite project because I can easily switch it out for every season with paper scraps I already have lying around. To make the candle look a witch-ier, I let it burn for 30 or so seconds, and intentionally tilted it to drip down the sides (that's how I got the black streak you can kind of see on the left side). The huge drip down the side of the candlestick was from letting the candle burn too long unmonitored, but I love the look, so it was a happy accident!

I can't believe Halloween is only five days away! What fun plans do you have for the evening?

Archi-Love | Haunted Houses

In the spirit of this creepy season, I thought I'd share some architecture of a scarier sort. I was curious as to why certain architectural styles were more likely to be considered "haunted" when I stumbled across this article from The Boston Globe:

The types of houses that embody classic horror-movie atmosphere -- the Addams Family manse and Norman Bates' hilltop aerie -- were cherished by their builders as models of state-of-the-art comfort. 

To Richard Morris Hunt, Henry Austin, and other Victorian architects, there was nothing so reassuring as solid, decorative bulk. In the shadow of industrialization, crenellated towers and gingerbread felt homey and safe. With the rise of Sears, Roebuck's mail-order houses, newly affluent prairie dwellers could order their dream homes from catalogs, then have the pieces delivered by freight train.

But what first-time homebuyers saw as homelike, later generations would come to see as sinister, says Dolores Hayden, professor of architecture and American Studies at Yale and author of the recent "A Field Guide to Sprawl" (Norton).

"These houses proclaim extravagant eccentricity," she says. "In no way do they seem to be balanced. If people had a little extra money they could add a turret, or two or three turrets. The overall effect is definitely peculiar."

Modernism's big windows and cool rationality banished the shadowy corners of the Victorian home. And in the sunny postwar years, the spanking-new split-levels of America's suburbs seemed ghost-free. By the 1970s, though, the ghosts were back. Steven Spielberg haunted a piece of California sprawl in "Poltergeist" (1982). Author Anne Rivers Siddons haunted a custom-built mini-mansion in her 1978 novel "The House Next Door."

The Richard Neutra modernist boxes beloved in Hollywood have yet to be haunted onscreen. But Dale Bailey, a horror novelist and author of "American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction," believes any house is hauntable. All it takes is the sense that once-cherished values are under attack.

Bailey notes that virtually every time someone comes up with a new type of house, someone else figures out a way to haunt it. Dean Koontz haunted a Bill Gates-style computerized house in 1999's "Demon Seed." Hollywood even gave us a haunted homepage in 2002's "FearDotCom." Bailey's own 2003 novel "House of Bones" featured a haunted housing project.

That made me shiver a time or two! Growing up in a small college town, we didn't have many commercial haunted houses to visit locally, but plenty of kids from my high school ventured into the many real abandoned shacks around town and had plenty of scary stories to tell afterward. I'm a bit of a wuss in the face of Halloween spookiness, but here are a few real haunts I'd love to visit:



I've technically been here a couple times already, but never overnight or for a Halloween tour. It's supposed to be haunted by a few different ghosts, and it's where "The Shining" was filmed! Check out the Wikipedia article. 

History may have been twisted a time or two in stories of the Salem Witch Trials, but something undoubtedly creepy happened here, and I've love to poke my nose around the museum and some graveyards.

Ben Lomond Hotel, Ogden, Utah

This one is one My Main Man's list. He's actually stayed the night here- I sure wouldn't after reading some of these things! However, I do have to say that I'm quite enchanted with this architecture. 

What real-life haunts have you visited or want to?