Do birds freak you out? Just me? Well, obviously not just me since Hitchcock made a movie all about how freaky birds are, which I’ve never seen because they creep me out. One by one birds are lovely little expressions of freedom, but in a group, menacing. So I wanted to make a little Halloween diorama celebrating that creepiness.

I am really not a great painter, so don’t be intimidated. The secret to the gradated background is by using a Floating Medium. I picked out four different colors ranging from navy through gray and down into a pale ice blue. Starting with my darkest color I dipped my brush in the floating medium and then into the paint and painted a stripe. Repeat that for all four colors and let the floating medium work the colors into one another. It’s kind of a magic effect.

Use a dry paintbrush and go over the paint one final time to blend in any brush strokes and give it a feathery look.

While that dries, make your birds. You can really use any kind of clay that you can harden, but I used an air dry clay.  Pinch off a small piece and roll it into a ball. With one hand, pinch to make a head.

Then with your other hand, push in to make the back and tail.

Give it any fine tuning necessary and let it dry.

Paint the birds black if necessary, but if you use black polymer clay and bake it, you can skip this step.

Drill two small holes in each side of the inside of the frame. Glue an end of wire inside each hole. Then glue your birds onto the wire.

I love the bleakness of that sky up against those birds. So spooky. Did you know that a collection of crows is called a murder? A murder of crows. How are we not supposed to be terrified by them?

Did I leave anything out? Are you better at learning visually? Lucky for you I made a video! Come subscribe to my Youtube channel and don’t miss a thing.

I go so crazy in my holiday decorating that there are really no surfaces left to decorate. Every table has a centerpiece, my mantle is filled to overflowing, and there’s barely a place left to set a drink. But that’s not going to stop me, oh no. Not by a long shot. I’ve already got two Halloween trees filling up corners, but I wanted to make something slightly smaller scale for the corner of the entry way.  Something that could stand up by itself and fill in any old spot that’s looking less than festive. This “Broom Parking” display is the perfect thing to put right by the front door for any guests needing a place to stash their transportation.

You’ll need:

Two wooden plaques. One large enough to be the base, and the other decorative to be the sign.

Two wooden dowels. Mine measure 3/4″ x 3′

Two spools of tulle.

Paint

A drill and bits

Ribbon

Rubons

Start by painting all the wood pieces black. Once the plaque you’ll be using for your sign has dried, I painted it with a coat of crackle medium. This will give my sign the cracked paint effect I want to make it look older and spookier.

While the crackle paint is drying, take your base and drill two holes in it. The paddle bit you use should be the same size as your dowels. Don’t drill all the way through, just about 3/4 of the way through to make a pocket for your dowels.  I drilled one of the holes straight down, and the other I drilled at an angle to make the brooms lean against each other.

Use a whole lot of wood glue and stick those dowels into their holes. I used a matte varnish to add a bit of polish to the broomsticks, and to give it a bit of texture I let the varnish drip and splatter so it would look like more than just flat painted dowels.

Meanwhile you can finish your sign. To get the best crackle effect, use a lot of paint and work quickly. You only get one coat so you need a heavy application, and once you start to see crackling happen you shouldn’t touch it. It won’t crackle twice so slap on your paint and leave it alone.

With the paint dry you can finish decorating the sign. I painted a black border, used rub-ons for my lettering, and then drilled a couple of holes through the top and used a ribbon to act as the hanger.

Cut your tulle into pieces roughly 18″ long. About 1/3 of the way up the broomstick, start hot gluing the tulle around to act as the bristles. Be very careful with the hot glue, it will pop right through that tulle and burn the crud out of your hands. Put pressure above and below the glue until it’s cool enough to touch. Keep adding tulle all around the broomstick, mixing the colors as you go.

Keep adding layers until you have some good volume, and the stick can’t be seen. If it get’s too bulky around the top, add some pieces underneath just a little lower down.

Glue one end of a length of twine to the top of your tulle and wrap it around a bunch of times, then glue the other end to the tulle. Use more hot glue to glue the sign in place by first gluing the ribbon on to the top, and then gluing the back of the plaque onto the broomsticks.

Anything confusing? Well then here, watch this video I made for you!

I love the geometric simplicity of a topiary, but I never have a traditional one around my house. Covered in greenery it is just far too classic to fit into my midcentury style. But at the holidays, all bets are off.

Last Christmas, sadly before the advent of Pinterest so I’ve totally lost track of the author, I saw a Christmas ornament decorated with squares of burlap. It’s been living in my head ever since, and now I’ve re-imagined that idea for a topiary I can love, and that works perfect for my fall decor.

You’ll need three dowels about 1 ft. tall. I bought a pack of six dowels already cut to size at the craft store. So they didn’t just look like dowels, I took a warm brown acrylic paint and watered it down to create a wash. Now they look like cinnamon sticks to me.

Stick the dowels into a 6″ styrofoam ball and glue in place. I also glued the sticks together for even more stability.

Cut a whole mess of burlap into rough squares. The wider the variety, the better it will look. Coat the styrofoam ball with glue one section at a time and stick the burlap down with a pin through the center. Pinch up all those raw edges to keep them out of the glue.

You can play around a bit to see how you like the burlap to look, but I found that spacing the squares out a little looked best to me. By packing them in tight you lose a little of that random look and don’t see as much of the burlap weave.

When you’ve got the whole ball covered in burlap squares, shove the other end of your dowels into another styrofoam piece. What piece you choose will depend on what you’ll be using as a vase for your topiary. This small column was thin enough to fit my vase, but a wider piece will provide more stability. Use glue to make it secure, then glue into your vase.

Use moss or some kind of basket filler to cover up the styrofoam. I went with this gray green moss because I had it on hand and I liked how the color worked with the burlap. You don’t want something matchy-matchy.

Use a beautiful grosgrain or satin ribbon and tie a great big bow just below the burlap ball. I hot-glued this in place so it didn’t slide anywhere.

I made two of these topiaries so I could flank my spooky tea service, but they’re so perfect for autumn that I’ll be able to leave them up all the way until the Christmas trees come out.

Sometimes inspiration is very inconvenient. I was so proud of myself for finishing all my Halloween projects so early in the month. The costumes are ready, treats have been sent, decorations have been made, and then, at the last minute, I got this little nagging voice in my head prompted by a thick hard cover book I picked up at the dollar store. The voice would not listen to me when I said I was done with Halloween crafts, it insisted I get to work. Luckily it didn’t take me very long.

The hot pink cover of my dollar store book did not really say “Witch” to me, so I picked up some black vinyl I got out of the remnant bin and started to cover it. You could use any of your favorite glues, but for this project, I used artist’s gesso. Mainly because I had it on hand and you’ll need it a few steps from now. Glue your cover to the book, and wrap the ends towards the inside.

Cut away the extra vinyl from the inside, and cut slashes into the spine to create a flap that can be folded over the top of the book and glued to the inside cover. I cut off some of the corner so I had less to glue down. Fold the corner in, and then the flap over towards the inside so that you’re wrapping it neatly like a present.

For the vinyl on the spine, cut the extra off neatly, right next to the book.

Use more gesso to stick the first page of the book down to cover up your vinyl edges.

Open to the middle of the book and pick a page with a lot of uniform text on it. Roll a few pages towards the middle to make the edges curl.

Paint the whole thing with gesso. On the pages you’ll need to cover some of the type, but on the edges, that’s what will keep the pages stuck together so you can have the spell book perpetually open. Try to keep those curled edges from flattening.

Paint the edges of the book with gold acrylic paint, and paint the pages brown. I watered down the paint and then wiped it off to get a ragged, aged, look.

You can make up whatever spells you want to, but if you’d like to use mine just download them below, print them out, and glue them into the book. I printed them on vellum paper because I loved the old fashioned look of it, and used a spray adhesive to stick it in place.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have this displayed in a way where the cover is shown, but just in case, I did a little messy heat embossing for a beat up look.

When it was time to come up with the spells to include, I thought about what spells a witch would need to consult the most often.
True Love Spell
To Remove Warts
Just click on the link and hit print and you’re all set to make your own book full of spells. Maybe I should have included one to make inspiration come when it was more convenient for me.

I love bringing a little holiday festivity into our living spaces with some seasonal pillows, but when you decorate as much as I do, storage becomes a problem in a hurry. Half of my garage is filled with Christmas decorations, adding a bunch of pillows would take up more space than I have. But a small square of fabric? That I can do. So the answer was to make a seasonal pillow that my everyday pillows could fit inside.

First you have to decorate the front. Since these pillows are going in my spooky cream and black room, I thought spiderweb pillows would be perfect. Cut a square of black fabric big enough to cover the front of the pillow you’ll be stuffing. A little roomy is better than too small, so cut it generously. Leaving at least a good inch of allowance in case you need to take it in a bit, fill the square with the spiderweb design. I used a silver thread and went over each line two or three times to get good visibility. Start by making two X’s in different directions, dividing the fabric into 1/8th’s.

Then connect those segments by sewing swooping, messy, lines across them. The messier you do this, the better it will look, since nature, but especially spooky spiders, is not perfect. Skip the occasional segment, don’t have the ends line up, make this look haphazard and it will look great.

To make the back, cut a piece of fabric the same width as the front, but a couple of inches wider. Cut this piece straight down the middle and insert a zipper. Trim the back piece as necessary when finished, so it matches the size of the front all over.

I added a ruffle to my pillow by creating a long strip of the contrast fabric, 4 inches wide. Double it over with the wrong sides together, and match the raw edges to the edge of the pillow front, pinning the pillow back piece on top of that. When it’s time to turn a corner, cut a slash in the seam allowance and stretch it open, being careful to pin the ruffle out of the way of the seamline. You don’t want to sew your ruffle to itself.

Open the zipper a bit before you sew, then sew all the way around the edge of the pillow, turn it right side out through the zipper, and put your usual every day pillow inside.

So often my holiday decor looks a little unbalanced as all the decorations go on the flat surfaces and all the soft parts of the room are left nakedly unfestive. Now I can make pillows for every holiday without needing to rent a storage unit.