Justine's Halloween Blog Party 2015

You're all welcome to attend my yearly Halloween Blog Party! It's in a new place this year, but it's not hard to find. You have a full moon to light your way.

Just follow that helpful little bat and his friends through the graveyard...

Almost there...

There's the place! Looks like it's raining, so you better hurry in.

I'll just open the door for you...

Welcome! Come on in!

Looks like the bats are staying for the party.

There are already some guests here to greet you!

Miranda was first to arrive as Rita Skeeter, that pesky, poison-pen reporter from the Harry Potter stories. She arrived early so she wouldn't miss a moment to report on.

Next was Alicia as a Mad Hatter Villain. She manages to be both colorful and scary at the same time. Look at those eyes! Alicia is a really talented makeup artist. Check out some of her Halloween makeup looks and tutorials here.

As if that Mad Hatter wasn't scary enough, two of those bats that flew into the house transformed into vampires before our very eyes! Patricia and her date Chris:

Old Fashion Halloween had a more traditional entrance when she knocked on the door. Although, being the Steampunk Seamstress that she is, she'd flown in on a Steampunk airship to get here.

We all heard the sound of dripping water outside. Something had emerged from the sea and was heading toward the house. It was Bob as Jaws!

There's lots of good music at the party thanks to Dead Air 98.3 FM: http://radiodork.com/

I've been listening to Dead Air through October and I've been hearing so many songs I've never heard before. Go listen, and I bet a lot of these songs will be new to you too. Dead Air dug deep, deep, deep into the past for some of these songs. There are quite a few from the 1930s.

Clay, the guy who assembled all of those wonderful vintage Halloween songs for Dead Air, sent his daughter Emily as his representative to the party. She emerged from the graveyard outside and glided to the door as a Corpse Bride!

Next to the door was a really creepy creature: Venom from the Spiderman comics! Just look at those claws. Venom had taken Jason as his host for the night.

A flash of fire shot up outside the window!

Out of the flames emerged Chris as a fashionable Devil!

Chris was also nice enough to bring brownies for everyone! (They were baked in the fires of Hell.)

Melody as Red Riding Hood came running up to the door with the big bad wolf on her heels! Luckily she made it inside in time.

There was more commotion in the graveyard. Look who stumbled out and made their way to the party! The Real Queen of Horror, Zena and her husband as a rebellious and a geeky zombie.

A fun party activity was watching the old Mickey Mouse cartoon "The Haunted House"

You might recognize a lot of the gifs in this post from that cartoon!

There's still time left if any of you would like to join the fun! Just send me a costumed pic and I'll add you to the group.

P.S. ~ As a little party treat to go with the Disney Halloween theme, here are bunch of cute coloring pages you can print out:

Disney Halloween Coloring Pages 

Welcome to the Witch Party! 2015

Last Saturday was our annual Witches' Gathering! Can you believe we've been having this party for 15 years now? I can hardly believe it. The last five or so parties, we've been adding an additional theme to the witch idea. This year, the theme was moons and spooky trees. A dark Halloween night theme where you can imagine seeing the moon through some twisting branches.

I decorated outside with some themed things like this old frame. I found this frame in an antique store years ago and on the back was written "1910" along with the name of the baby pictured inside. So this frame is old. It's made of some kind of thin metal. I searched online for vintage moon illustrations and found one that is probably from the same time this frame was made.

I had fun printing a few vintage pics and pieces of clip art out and coloring them in for the porch display. That little purple tree cast a shadow on that spooky tree piece of art which gave me sort of the impression of a forest.

The pumpkins got witchified:

I love this garland from Dollar Tree. It looks so happy and vintage.

The skull which you usually see as a pirate was out in its witch attire.

This year's invitations:

I was lucky to find some perfectly matched envelopes at Target!

I printed out my drawing of a witch flying over a haunted forest and then added some shimmery moons that were punched out of card stock. I happened to have a circle hole punch that was the right size. Look how shimmery that moon is!

I found these cute witch sticker sheets at Party City. They were part of a larger set of stickers. I ended up with some pretty neat sugar skull stickers in this set. Oh! I just found the set on their site: Halloween Fun Stickers If you zoom way, way in, you'll see the sugar skulls at the top. Those other skeleton stickers are all these little bones you piece together yourself. Party City is a fun place to check out at Halloween. I don't think I go in there at any other time of year, but I always get a kick out of seeing what's there in October.

A few doors down from Party City is the Dollar Tree. I stopped over there and scored a majorly cool deal. This amazingly glittery eyeshadow from Wet 'n Wild:

This stuff packs major sparkle. It was just what I'd been hoping for. After shopping around for weeks in hopes of finding glitter that was celestial enough for a moon themed party, I find this for $1.00! And guess what? The glitter actually stays where you put it!

So here's my eye after it was glitterized:

I went through my jewelry to find something moon and star shaped and chose these two necklaces. I didn't realize until putting that full moon type one on how much it looked like a moon in a sky of stars with my t-shirt. A few of you maybe saw me tweeting months back about making that necklace. I painted the back of one of those clear glass circles with nail polish, then glued a back (bezel) on it. The glass pieces are from Dollar Tree. One of their better deals!

Jumbo Clear Accent Gems 

I got really into painting nail polish on the backs of these over the summer.

I wore what I refer to as my "fishing lure earrings" because I believe they could actually catch a fish.

So I was all blinged out and ready to go!

Like last year, we used those crescent roll baking sheets to make these moon buns. I just realized we used crescent rolls to make crescent moons. It was a funny process because the dough was being super stretchy.

Also, like last year we had the baked ziti dish.

But unlike last year, we had a new orange salad. It was one of those things that might sounds strange when you describe the flavors but it's really good! There's the oranges, red onions, and parsley topped with olive oil, salt and pepper.

We made triple chocolate cupcakes, which I decorated as gold harvest moons with a spooky tree blowing in the wind across them. People really liked these cupcakes! So if you want to make a sure thing, I'll pass along what's in here: A Moist Supreme Pillsbury boxed chocolate cake with pudding included, mixed with a cup of chocolate chips. It's fast and people love it. It's a magical recipe like rum balls where you don't have to spend much time to make something that will be popular!

See how glittery the trees are? That's thanks to this Sparkle Gel I picked up at Jo-Ann Crafts. I'd never used this before, so I was wondering how that was going to go. Turns out it's pretty easy to manage! If you have a steady hand and some drawing skills, you can just freehand some designs on your baking. I would definitely buy this again! It comes in all kinds of colors. And if you're wondering, it didn't taste like much of anything to me.

You might remember these cupcake wrappers from last year's After Halloween Target Haul. They fit the theme with that full moon.

We had originally planned to stand these chocolate trees on the cupcakes. Ooooh boy. You know how things sometimes look easier on Pinterest than they are in real life. Uh huh. I like how they look in this pic, but they are tedious to make and have this little habit of melting after coming out of the freezer. But if you're up for torturing yourself, basically what you do is draw/squeeze out melted chocolate onto some wax paper in a tree shape and then freeze it for a bit. It didn't help that the chocolate shot out of the squeeze bag either... Anyway, I just wanted to share this picture to show that we at least managed to make some chocolate trees!

Another Dollar Tree purchase was some metallic card stock, which I thought was a pretty good deal! I thought I was getting five sheets of gold but under that first gold sheet was silver, blue, red, and green. So just a heads up there. But they're all pretty. I cut some little moons and stars out of the card stock and scattered them around the table.

Little witches were flying across the moon on these treat bags:

Another Dollar Tree purchase were these little trees. They sold out right away, so I'm glad we picked them up when we saw them. They're working as place card holders holding these little moons with our names.

Full moon and spooky tree napkins from Pick 'n Save:

The tablescape:

I took some strips of the gold card stock and curled them around a pencil to make these little curlicues in the flowers. I thought that gave a fun festive look that I might actually try for other holidays.

 Mom and me with the cupcakes:

Remember my little coffin shaped poison bottle from the estate sale? It got to debut with the other little bottles this year.

As did my wicked new book of potions.

Our guests brought us some neat gifts like this picture frame:

And this little kitchen towel. Well, that's what it will be once we add water. I haven't tried that yet. There's a little flying witch cookie cutter with it.

How cute is this?

"Witches Brew" It's either a soup bowl or a massive coffee mug.

As it became dark, the outdoor decorations lit up.

Our own spooky branch and the actual moon in the distance.

Isn't he adorable? Actually this owl is pretty spooky when it's looking down at you in the dark!

I cut a big moon and stars out of the gold card stock and taped it up outside.

It happened to fit with the actual moon that night! If you use your imagination, it looks like the moon has a little nose and lips.

An actual crescent moon shining above the silhouette of some real spooky trees. You can't ask for more than that!

I hope you enjoyed these photos! I always look forward to sharing them.

I'm planning the annual Halloween Blog Party for next weekend, so if you have a costumed photo of yourself from any point in your life and would like to join the fun, please email it to me!