Runaway October

I’ve been pretty busy lately. There’s only 61 days ’til Haloween, which means about 54 until our party.

So far I’ve:

• Stained our garage util­ity sink tea-staining cheesecloth.
• Made about half a skele­ton worth of paper mache bones.
• Redid a giant plas­tic pump­kin I picked up at a yard­sale. It needed paint and sand­ing and such.
• Made PVC flicker candles
• And destroyed a lamp and chan­de­lier and put it all back together as a, what I like to call, Lampalier!

Ta da!

Not bad, eh? I had an old shiny brass light fix­ture we took down out of the house and an aged brass lamp base I picked up at Good­Will for like $3. I took them apart, stuck them back together, had my dad cut some metal disks for the can­dle­holder parts and painted. Of course, I don’t have any big can­dles handy at the moment, but you get the idea. And it’s very big and heavy. Very dra­matic. Also, no “before” pic­tures. I’m lazy like that.

And this is where I admit where I was wrong. Was that a col­lec­tive gasp I just heard?! I know, I know. I was bab­bling about what color to paint it one evening and my hus­band sug­gests Matte Black. I prob­a­bly gave him the stu­pid­est look ever. Matte Black? Seri­ously? Men have no sense. Seri­ously. So I pick out this ham­mered black color and grab some dark grey auto­mo­tive primer and start prim­ing away. Prob­lem is I really like the primer color, so Matte Black it shall stay. I love you honey!

It’s gonna show fin­ger­prints like crazy, but what doesn’t in my house?

Don’t ask about the chair on the table. I was gonna drape a back­ground cloth but my fam­ily was giv­ing me too many crazy looks.

See those can­dles? Made ‘em. Yep. I’m not entirely sure open flames will be a good idea, so these “can­dles” will be used with flick­er­ing LED tealights in strate­gic loca­tions where I really appre­ci­ate things NOT catch­ing on fire. Here’s a tuto­r­ial, if you are so inclined. I would like to add though, to skip the expend­ing foam step. The stuff is expen­sive and a pain. Just turn your tea light on, put it in, and stuff some news­pa­per or gro­cery bags under­neath it. You don’t need to worry about heat or melt­ing or any­thing like that.

So have you started on your Hal­loween stuff yet? Is it too early to start decorating?

So, my pho­tographs are typ­i­cally pretty… blah. I took pho­tog­ra­phy in High School, but for some rea­son my brain is just not trans­fer­ring those skills to digital.

One of my goals this year is too get bet­ter with my cam­era and coin­ci­den­tally The MCP Project 52 signups hap­pened to cross my path.

Here’s the gist:

MCP Project 52 – It’s a way to encour­age cre­ativ­ity, make pho­tog­ra­phy fun, and pro­vide a chal­lenge with­out actual pres­sure. Par­tic­i­pants will [sic] shar­ing their art work and images weekly while inspir­ing each other.

The theme of the first week, which I am slightly behind on, was “Around The House” so here’s my go.

Click to embiggen

I fixed some of the overblown and added a vin­tage photo fil­ter to it.

I hop­ing that if I keep fid­dling with my cam­era every week that I’ll get bet­ter. Hope­fully.

If you’d like to join–and we’d love to have you–the infor­ma­tion is here. And be sure to stop by the Flickr pool of all the par­tic­i­pat­ing pho­tos here. There are some out­stand­ing pho­tos in there!

I seem to do this every year around this time, don’t I?

How do you like it? Any­thing weird that you notice?

And speak­ing of shiny, or more appro­pri­ately, shin­ers, how do you like this baby? He, sadly, did it to him­self when one of the stools he was bal­anc­ing on slipped out from under him. Poor dude.

I took all these pic­tures inside at night, so par­don the crappy qual­ity. It was either take them NOW or know that I’d never get to it later.

Not a hand­made present, but Curt the Dirt was my craft­ing buddy through the 3 mad days I did most of these in. I really need to stop procrastinating.

Oh god, look­ing over these pic­tures.… I really should be shot for post­ing some of these. :S

Com­plete with tramp stamp:

Seat belt covers:

Tuto­r­ial here: Seat­belt sleeves by AfricanKelli

Car trash bag:

It uses bon­ing to keep itself open. Cool huh? Tuto­r­ial here: Trash Bag by Make it and Love it

A few belts to help keep the pants up on my super skinny boys. Tuto­r­ial here: Boy Belts by Elsie Marley

Can­is­ter sleeves for my mother in law to match her red kitchen. Time con­sum­ing but super cute, eh?

Tuto­r­ial here: Quilted Can­is­ter Sleeves by HandmadeMommy

Some freezer paper sten­cil shirts. Appar­ently I for­got to take a pic­ture of some, but here’s a few of them.

(I was try­ing for a grungy look. I swear. )

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Did you make any­thing for Christ­mas presents? Let us know!

We hope you had a won­der­ful 2010 and that 2011 only gets bet­ter from there!

Love and light from us!

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