My First Word Cloud

I don't like Halloween. I said it. I'm especially dreading this one because it seems like there is a dress up day at work that everyone does. I've just never liked it. I don't like creepy, spooky things. But I've been warming up to Halloween now that I'm making my own decorations. I've found you can make some cute stuff! If I like anything, it's more of an All Hallows Eve aspect with witches and magic (you know, like Charmed - what a great TV show). I like stuff like that. Zombies, ghosts, snakes, blood, monsters. No. Just no.

I've been loving word clouds (did you know they were called that?) and have been wanting to make my own for ages. My problem was that I didn't want to have to buy a frame to put one in. We've got a pile of old frames sitting in an old chest so I pulled one out and got permission to paint it. I felt kind of bad because it looked like it was pretty.

I'm sure I could have restained it to make it look nice but that would mean buying stain and all that jazz. Instead, I just covered it up with black paint. Because black is Halloweeny. Sorry pretty gold border.

I painted the frame black and then traced the pretty border with Mod Podge and sprinkled purple glitter on top (because purple and black go with my other Halloween decoration I'll be sharing next week). I then coated the top in Mod Podge because the glitter kept falling off.

Here is the pretty word cloud I made in the shape of a witch's hat. I used works like witch, cauldron, bubble, magic, spell, etc.

I've never shared a printable before. I have updated the image file so it's no longer transparent. I don't know how people usually do printables. I just copied my image into a Microsoft Word document since it has a white background, centered it, and printed it off. Otherwise, you can make your own at this awesome website called Tagxedo using whatever words, colors, and shapes you want. Now if I could just figure out how to customize the colors...

I don't have some huge pile of amazing paper but I've got some nice linen paper I bought for resumes so I printed it on that. Doesn't it look awesome?! I love it!

 

I've just started with little Halloween touches in my fall decorations. I'll be putting more up next week after my birthday on the 15th.

2013 update:

I'm linking up here this week!And here:

A Spooky/Kooky Pumpkin Family

Here is my spooky kooky family of pumpkins! We've got vampires, zombies, and mummies oh my!

I love these pumpkins but I must say, I'm a bit disappoint - I suppose with the quality of the pumpkins I bought because they're already getting gross and it hasn't even been a week! When you make yours, make sure it's closer to Halloween!

This weekend, I'm linking up to...
Eighteen25 Halloween Linkup

Zombie Pumpkins

While flipping through a copy of Martha Stewart Living magazine, I stumbled across a bunch of easy pumpkin carving ideas that I HAD to try! I hadn't carved pumpkins in years but the moment I saw them, I rushed out for supplies. The first was a zombie pumpkin. Here's what Martha's looked like:

 

I couldn't find white pumpkins anywhere so I just tried to find some of a small-medium size. I wanted something a bit different and not just orange (although I'll be using that later and featuring all my pumpkins together at the end of the week) so I bought a buttercup squash from the grocery store.

 

I made circles for the eyes and just kept carving them until they were big enough that the eye wedged in the hole. These will need to be 'cone' shaped (so angled). I found the buttercup squash to have an extra difficult to cut rind. It also turned my fingers temporarily green!

Then, with the label that I printed from the zombie page (linked above), I used a thumb tack to draw an outline of the mouth which made it a lot easier to carve.

Then you just shove the eyeballs in at different angles and you have your zombie! I think mine looks more silly than zombie-ish but it's still so cute! I smile every time I see it! In retrospect, I think when I make another one this week, I'll space the eyes further apart to see if that helps.

 braiinnssss

Stay tuned all week for more pumpkins - including vampire and mummy all courtesy of Martha Stewart Living!