12 Days of Halloween ~ 6 6 6 Devilish Dips

On the sixth day of Halloween my true love gave to me:

1 Hounted Castle
A 2 Faced Suit
A 3 Eyed Carved Pumpkin
4 Spooky Spiderwebs
5(0) Shades of Orange
And 6 6 6 Devilish Dips

That's not even true. It's only 2 Dips I made... and the photos I took didn't turn out very well at all so you get an old instagram picture from one of our game nights.

Hummus
200g cooked chick peas
30g dark tahini paste
1tbs lemon juice
1/2ts ground cumin
1/ts sea salt
40ml water

Throw all ingredients in a mixer/food processor and you're done!

Artichoke-Cashew-Creme
150g antipasti artichokes in oil
40g dried tomatoes in oil
240g cashews or cashew paste
70ml water
black pepper as needed

Throw all ingredients together again. Wroom wroooom. You got a lovely dip.

Serve both chips with corn chips or bread or veggie sticks. Whatever floats your boat.
Happy Halloween & good night out there. Whatever you are!

12 Days of Halloween ~ 5(0) Shades of Orange

On the second day of Halloween my true love gave to me:

1 Hounted Castle
A 2 Faced Suit
A 3 Eyed Carved Pumpkin
4 Spooky Spiderwebs
And 5(0) Shades of Orange

I was planning to do make some kind of decoration using different shades of orange, like these spray painted Candy Corn Bottles. What I ended up doing was searching Pinterest for the most fun Halloween prints and printing a bunch of posters to hang up for the party. I still like the title I wanted to give to this post, so I just left it. Deal with it!

Here we go:

Hallway Decoration.

Bedroom Door Decoration (the bedroom was off limits for the party).

Kitchen Decoration.

More kitchen Decoration.

Bathroom Decoration (so cute!).

12 Days of Halloween ~ 4 Spooky Spiderwebs

On the fourth day of Halloween my true love gave to me:

1 Hounted Castle
A 2 Faced Suit
A 3 Eyed Carved Pumpkin
And 4 Spooky Spiderwebs

I got this idea from pinterest (where else?) and traced it back to the wonderful design and diy blog How About Orange. All you need for these playgrounds of your favorite creepy crawlers are trashbags, preferably black or another dark colour.

The first thing you have to do is to cut off the sides off the trashbags and try to make a square. This way you can do 2 spiderwebs at a time.

Next you fold up the square 3 times until you're left with this shape. Then you can draw one 8th of your spiderweb, it's totally up to you which size it will be and how thick the web is, just like when you make a snowflake craft.

You can cut away the most part of the trashbag now and the result should look something like this.

And the end result then looks something like this.
Repeat this process for multiple spiderwebs. I created 4 in total as the post title suggests.

Now you just have to hang them up in spiderweb-appropriate places. If you've been lazy with the dusting this diy is probably not interesting for you as you already have pretty realistic halloween decorations on your walls.

Happy Halloween & good night out there, whatever you are!

This post will be part of Nina's Upcycling Tuesday and the Creadienstag.

12 Days of Halloween ~ 3 Eyed Carved Pumpkin

On the third day of Halloween my true love gave to me:

1 Hounted Castle
A 2 Faced Suit
And a 3 Eyed Carved Pumpkin

What's Halloween without a carved pumpkin? I've always loved to cut a gruesome face into a beautiful pumpkin head. Even though we didn't really have the trick or treat walkarounds when I was a kid I've always been fascinated with the horror and fantasy around this holiday. And the pumpkin is the most recognisable symbol for this spooky time of the year.

I always start by cutting a zig zag pattern with a long and sharp knife to create a lid for the head.

Then I carve out all the pumpkin brains. I saved the pumpkin seeds and put them in the oven for about half an hour to dry with some spices and salt for a quick snack.
I always carve out the edible pumpkin flesh as well. I know that a lot of people don't do this when they carve a pumpkin for decorations, but I think that is such a waste of an edible vegetable. The flesh is good for a yummy pumpkin soup like the one displayed on the bottom of this post.

The actual carving design of the pumpkin is up to you. I chose to carve three triangular eyes with pupils, two slits for a nose and two connected zig zag patterns as a wide mouth.

I placed the pumpkin outside on the balcony rightaway, put a candle in its belly and lighted the candle to make it feel warm inside. And to give us a great view when looking outside in the dark. Doesn't it look handsome next to our castle?

I bid you farewell now. Happy Halloween & good night out there, whatever you are...
This post will be part of the Creadienstag.

12 Days of Halloween ~ 2 Faced Suit

On the second day of Halloween my true love gave to me:

1 Hounted Castle
and a 2 Faced Suit

We bought the future husband a shiny suit from the second hand store and were planning to bleach half of it to make it look like it fell into acid like Two Face from the Batman Universe. It turns out that not all cloth is able to be bleached, so what happened after I drenched half of the suit jacket in bleach? Nothing!

So now we had to figure out a different way to alter half of the suit.

And here's what he did:

He used three different cans of spray paint. A white on eas a base and then yellow and orange to get the acid look going on. Not too much work, but smelly if you use the spray paint outside.

For our Halloween Party this last Saturday I painted half of his face with various make up and theatre face paint to get the whole Two Face look.

The elephant hat is for the future husbands Halloween party at his Kindergarten. Too bad he's got bronchitis and won't be able to go..

Happy Halloween! And good night out there, whatever you are.

12 Days of Halloween ~ 1 Haunted Castle

On the 1st day of Halloween my true love gave to me:

1 Haunted Castle

For this gruesome castle you need the following tools and materials:
1 cardboard box (one side of the boy, anyways)
1 cardboard cutter
a black marker
reddish/brown paint
black paint
a paint brush

I can't draw very well so I asked the future husband to draw me up a castle on one side of the packaging of our new tv. Then I used the cutter to cut out the castle and the windows and door within.

I used some reddish/brown paint to colour the roofs and added a bit of black paint to colour the hill a more dark brown. With the black paint I painted around the windows to give them some depth.
I added tiles to the roof, bricks to the walls and grass to the hill with a permanent marker.

The castle looks really nice in our big livingroom window, facing the balcony. A stormy and rainy night like the one in this shot adds to the spookyness as well.

The back of the castle was coloured with black paint to cover up all the packaging prints on the cardboard, so the castle looks awesome from inside and outside.

And here's a daytime shot. A little less gruesome looking, but stll very pretty.

Happy Halloween! And a good night out there, whatever you are!

12 Days of Halloween Blogstravaganza

You might be familiar with the English Christmas Carol The Twelve Days of Christmas. Since my favorite holiday is Halloween I thought it might be fun to do a 12 Days of Halloween Blogstravaganza.

12 days and 12 crafty/foody/thrifty & decorative projects all around the Halloween theme. The first day will be this Sunday, the 20th and the last day is All Hallow's Eve, the 31st of October.
Until then.. Happy Halloween!

The Long Night of DIY @ Dawanda Snuggery

I've been to yet another workshop. It was the long night of diy this saturday, an event that originates from the long night of museums where museums are open late into the night. Of course the lovely people from Dawanda thought of this and had their very own event at their workshop/store, the Snuggery. There were actually three different workshops. Our first and favorite one was:
Stamp Carving




I made 12 stamps in total, because they're just so easy and fun to make. They're actually made out of erasers which is very easy to carve and cut. I definitely have to get me a set of carving tools. It's someting I'd enjoy very much to do at home. You never know when you need a stamp!

After writing or painting the desired stamp image/word on the eraser (don't forget to write mirrored letters) I used the thin carving tool to cut out the excess eraser parts outside the writing.

With the bigger tool you can get rid off the outer bit to avoid side prints. Side prints can also look really cool though if you take a look at my cocktail a few pictures up.

My friend Romie was with me again and she made quite a few stamps herself. One of my favorites was the BagUP! stamp for her sister's developing project where she makes bags out of recycled plastic shopping bags.

The second station was:
Screen Printing

We each got to print on a tote bag. It was too bad that the prints were pre-made already and there were only two to choose from. This way the time spent at this station was limited to the few minutes it took to print on the bag and blow dry it a bit.

The third station was:
Friendship Bracelets Knotting...
There are no pictures of this station, because, frankly, we thought it was boring... sorry.

But there also was a photo booth station.. YAY

Lot's of props to choose from!

Fun, fun fun! Thanks to Dawanda for hosting this lovely evening of crafting & eating & chatting with fellow crafters. See you soon.