1

Apple Of My Pie

Posted by Corrie on 12:30 PM in ,
I’ve been doing so many projects over the past week or so that I haven’t even had time to write about them! But I wanted to jump in today with a quick post about how I spent my evening last night while Darren was at his pickup basketball game.
The holidays are my favorite time of year, and I’m always looking for ways to prolong all the delicious smells and dishes that seem to go along with the season. This is especially the case for the hellish three and a half months of Cleveland winter that follow, during which time comfort food is the only means of sanity survival. For me, apple pie is one of those comfort foods, along with apple crisp or any other dessert that remotely resembles apple pie and does not come from an aluminum can  (which is just gloppy and unacceptable). So, let me tell you how to savor the flavor. Do your own canning. Go ahead and laugh. What is this, the early 1900s? No, friends. It’s 2011, and the economy is crap. So let me teach you how to be resourceful. And lazy. At the same time. I’m blowing your mind right now, I know. Canning may seem like a lot of work on the day you are preparing everything, but it allows you to indulge in cold-weather-laziness for the rest of winter knowing that half the work of a delicious homemade dessert is already done for you. That’s a win in my book. Canned apple pie filling has its obvious use – pie – but can also be used as the base for apple crisp or topping for ice cream, waffles, pancakes, and any other creation you can think of. And, if you were an overzealous apple picker at the fruit farm this year, it’s a great way to use up any extra apples you might be tired of eating without letting them go to waste. Maybe you can even give the jars as cheap but yummy gifts to your pie-loving coworkers. (Spoiler alert if any my coworkers are reading this.) If you’ve read this far, I think you know what I did last summer was doing last night...canning apple pie filling!



Canning is different from regular cooking in that you have to precisely follow a recipe that was specifically created for home canning. Unfortunately, you can’t just take any old recipe and throw it in a ball jar, nor can you just eyeball the ingredients and make modifications to suit your tastes (which is usually my preferred way of cooking).  The reason for this is that there are food safety standards you need to adhere to when preserving food. Blah blah , standards, blah blah....Just kidding.  It’s important to find a canning-approved recipe in order to avoid the food spoiling, or even worse, getting someone sick from botulism. Don’t get freaked out. Just find a book on home canning, do a Google search for “canned <insert name of food>”  or look up your state university food safety extension office which will have all the recipes and guidelines laid out for you. Here’s the apple pie recipe I used, laid out in a nice pie chart, from the Ohio State University Extension Office. Whatever you use will likely be the same, or similar, so I’m just going to give you a little play by play of how it all went down.

Knowing I would need to move pretty quickly once the apples were prepared, I gathered up all my necessary 'equipment' and washed and dried everything. This included my water bath canner (you can find them at Walmart and most grocery stores starting around late August), 7 quart sized jars with never-before-used lids (the sealing compound needs to be intact so an airtight seal will form), a funnel, a stock pot for the 'syrup,' another pot to blanche the apples, a cutting board, bowl, and if you are lazy lucky, an 'apple machine.' Needless to say, my little kitchen was quite crowded with all this stuff. And don’t forget the apples! I gathered up the two giant bags of apples we picked at the end of September and gave them a good rub scrub down. I think they were a mixture of Cortland and Jona-gold, but I don't remember because it was so long ago. There we a few bad ones I had to throw out, which didn't surprise me because it had been awhile since we picked them.


Enter stage right: The Best Kitchen Invention Ever. Action!


It's an apple corer-peeler-slicer thingy...aka torture device...aka apple machine (I think that's its real name)! Mine was a gift from my mom, but I think you can find them on Amazon. Even if you only make apple pie once a year, you need one of these. It simultaneously peels, cores and slices your apples in a matter of seconds. I think I was able to get through all the apples I needed for my 7 quarts of pie filling within 15 minutes. Ah-mazing.  Anyway, before I got carried away with my apple torture device, I started heating a stock pot half full with water in preparation to blanche the apples. I also filled my water bath canner half full with water to start bringing it to a simmer. (I wanted it to be ready ahead of time because as soon as the jars are filled, they need to start processing in the water bath canner immediately.) I cut the apple rings in half and set them aside with a bit of lemon juice until I could get through all of them. Then I blanched them in batches.


(I promise my apples weren't really a freakish yellow color. I just have terrible lighting in my kitchen, along with yellow painted walls, which tends give all my in-the-kitchen pictures a yellow tint at night.) The already blanched apples stayed warm in a covered bowl while did new batches. When all the apples were ready, I prepared the 'syrup,' which consisted of spices, water, apple juice, sugar and a canning-specific thickening powder called UltraGel. (UltraGel takes the place of cornstarch and also happens to be a pain in the arse to find. Hence the reason I picked apples in September and am just now canning them in November. I ended up ordering it online.)  It all went in the pot to bubble and thicken, while I whisked away so nothing would clump or burn on the bottom.


Once everything was nice and thick, I added the apples back in, folding them so they wouldnt break apart while being fully coated by the syrup. Oh boy were things starting to smell delicious. I wish they made scratch-and-sniff computer screens for your benefit. Now that the whole shebang was ready, I spooned the mixture into my quart sized jars, using a wide mouthed funnel and leaving an inch of head space at the top.
Photo courtesy of www.pickyourown.org
I found the funnel (along with a magnetic lid grabber and plastic spatula) as part of a canning tool kit when I bought the water bath canner. Not only does the funnel fit perfectly inside the jar, but it reaches exactly an inch down into the jar, which serves as a foolproof guideline for the highest point to which you should fill.


Remove the funnel and take a look at the sides of the jar. You will likely see a few air bubbles, so use a spatula or knife to slowly push along the sides and get rid of them.


Then I placed the lids on the jars and attached the screw caps. Most water bath canners come with a metal rack that perfectly holds up to 7 quart sized jars.

Photo courtesy of www.pickyourown.org
I put 6 in mine, then used the handles to lower the rack into the pot (which should be at a simmer by now if you started it earlier.) The water should cover the jars by 1 to 2 inches, so if it doesn’t, add a bit more.


With the water at a boil, I put the lid on the pot and started the processing time according to the recipe – in this case, it was 25 minutes. When the processing time was up, I pulled the hot jars out using a jar grabber (also in the canning tool kit) and set them on a towel to cool. I also checked the lids to make sure they were concave, meaning they have sealed properly.

Photo courtesy of www.pickyourown.org
In the words of Borat - great success!

You might have realized at this point that the recipe makes 7 quarts of pie filling, but I only processed 6 jars. Well, you didn’t expect me to stand around smelling all this deliciousness and not eat any of it, did you!? I mean, how could I give away all this pie filling without even knowing how it tastes? So, I dumped what would’ve been the 7th jar of filling into a small baking dish and whipped up a quick crumble topping. If you needed to be convinced of the convenience of this recipe, it took me about 5 seconds to put the filling in the pan and mix it with a dash of vanilla extract, and only another 5 min to make the crumble topping ( 1/3 C oats, 1/3 C flour, ½ C brown sugar, 6T cold butter, a dash of salt and a dash of cinnamon mixed with a fork until crumbly). I baked it at 400 degrees for 30 minutes – a sweet surprise for Darren when he returned home from basketball.


Who am I kidding. It was really just a sweet surprise treat for me. Wink!


25

DIY Typography Art

Posted by Corrie on 9:19 AM in , ,
Happy Wednesday! If you remember from Monday, among the pumpkin carving shenanigans in my Halloween post, I let you all in on a little preview of my latest DIY project. In case you missed it, I made a personalized, typographic art print for Darren's niece/my goddaughter, Olivia, who was celebrating her first birthday this past weekend. Her mom had made a specific gift request, but since I like to give homemade gifts, I thought I would supplement the requested gift with something else. Of course, I turned to my favorite inspiration-inducing culprit, Pintrest, to get some ideas. If you're a frequent reader of this blog (do any actually exist?), you might remember this Pottery Barn 'pinspired' home decor project awhile back. We interrupt this program for a brief announcement.

If you haven't yet discovered Pintrest, you don't know what you're missing. It's like the preferred drug of eye-candy oglers and bookmarking fanatics. I'm addicted, on it until the wee hours, and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside...only instead of just saying no, I say heck yes every time. And it's legal.

There. I'm done. Sorry for the bordering-on-creepy analogy. Back to business.

There were tons of adorable (and DIY-able) baby items and projects I was finding, but for some reason, the personalized art was really striking a chord with me. I think what I liked most about the art was that many of the prints could be appreciated by Olivia for years to come, versus clothes and accessories, which she would quickly outgrow. These were a couple of my favorite finds.

                                                                              Source: etsy.com via Corrie on Pinterest

  Source: etsy.com via Corrie on Pinterest

I loved how the first print colorfully emphasizes "I love you" within the alphabet, while the second was more personalized with a name and initial.  Apart from all other practical and baby-gift-related reasons, I think that typography is pretty much the bees knees (does anyone even use that phrase anymore?). Plus it seemed like something my graphic-arts-rookie self could tackle. Double win. For some reason, seeing the "I love you" print reminded me of Robert Indiana's iconic LOVE screen print.

Photo courtesy of www.moma.org
And...woop there it is was. My inspiration (or perhaps 'pinspiration,' thanks to Pintrest's influence). I could do my own take on Indiana's print, personalizing the 'O' with Olivia's name repeated in different fonts and sizes like the 'E' print above. Since I didn't have a plain template to work from, knew I would likely need to make a lot of text boxes, and assumed I would want to have a lot of control over placement, color etc., I knew Microsoft Publisher wasn't going to cut it. However, I don't have Photoshop or Illustrator (I'm too poor to invest the money into buying those programs considering the little bit of design stuff I like to pretend I can do), so I jumped into my ghetto fabulous free version of Gimp, a Photoshop program wannabe.                




From there, I opened a blank 8.5"x11" 'image,' found a serif font that looked like the one in Indiana's print, and created a separate text box for each giant letter. I rotated the 'O' and changed the font color to a shade of grey so that I could use it as an outline over which to place the text boxes. 





Next mission: create many, many text boxes. I wanted one of Olivia's names to stand out more than the others, so I made that as the first layer in a nice scripted font. Then, like a mad woman, I continued creating 'Olivia' text box layers in all sizes and fonts. Some were all lower case, some all upper case, and some in the traditional proper noun way, but I tried to vary them to keep it interesting. It really started filling in, as you can see in the up-close-and-personal screen shot below.


Some of the small spaces were getting hard to fill in, but I tried not to let them bother me too much. In fact, I saved a number of them for last, since it was hard to find fonts that I could make small enough to fit, but would still be legible. Once everything was filled in, I removed the original 'O.'  


I was so excited about how it turned out that I got off the couch and did an Ellen-esque dance. Only substitute the cheering audience and President Obama with an unfazed Darren at the other end of the couch (my spontaneous bursts of dancing no longer surprise him). 


Somewhere between finishing the 'O' and busting a move in my living room, I came to the realization that I could do the same design with the 'V,' which couldn't be more perfect since Olivia's last name is Vaughan.  (The excitement probably only enhanced my dance moves.) So I immediately got to work on it in the same way I started the 'O' - by greying out the letter 'V', creating a large focal point word in the same font as the one in the 'O,' and throwing in text box layers. It was starting to look like The Sorcerer's Apprentice up in this place, only with multiplying text layers instead of brooms.





The skinny, right side of the 'V' was a bit challenging because the fonts had to be so small to fit. I didn't want them all the same size, so I made some of the words vertical or broken into two lines. 



When all was said and done, I removed the original, grey 'V.'


I was really happy with how it came out, but it needed some color. Her room has light blue and light green paint colors, so I considered coordinating the print. However, I also thought about using colors that would be more timeless (less pastel/baby-ish) in hopes that Olivia would still enjoy her art as she grows older and into more mature room decor. 


Ultimately, I decided that the green and blue looked too washed out. The black and rose were a bit more sophisticated, plus the pink color of the focal words drew attention to her full name within the initials. 


A smidge of color and 230 text layers later, I was done. Since Olivia's room doesn't currently have anything on the walls except a tree and Winnie the Pooh mural in the far corner (I knew this from little a reconnaissance mission I did last time I was at their house), I wanted to make sure the print was a fairly large size. I found a 12" square frame with an 8" mat, which I thought would be the perfect size - big enough to read the print and square to fit the shape of the text. Plus it was on sale for 50% off at Michael's. Boo-yah. I had some leftover 110lb card stock leftover from doing the programs for Rachel's wedding, so I took some of it to Office Max to have my art printed. It came out really nice (though I might try matte photo paper next time just to see what the difference is). I just barely had enough time to frame and wrap it before the party, so I didn't have time to take a picture. Jamie (Olivia's mom) had to send me one from her phone later. 


It seemed that a lot of people at the party liked it, and one of my friends even suggested that I try selling other customized versions on Etsy. What do you guys think? Would you be interested in something like this, either with a child's first and last name or a whole family's first names and last name? Now that I have a 'template,' I wonder how long it would take me to make a new version. Regardless, I hope it has inspired you to try your own typography art. It really was quite simple...just time consuming!...but with a fun result.

Since Pintrest was a big part of my inspiration for this project, I've decided to link this post up as part of the fall Pintrest Challege, hosted by the lovely and always inspiring ladies at Young House Love, Bower Power, Ana White and House of Earnest. (I participated in their summer challenge here.) I could only dream of aspiring to their level of blogging greatness and general DIY coolness. 


As well as a couple of other link 'parties':

Good Life WednesdaysPhotobucket
As always, I would love to hear your feedback! Do you have any cool typography prints in your house? Do you think this project has Etsy potential? 

5

All Hallows Eve

Posted by Corrie on 11:05 PM in ,
Happy Halloween everyone! I think what might be scariest about today is that it has been nearly a MONTH since I've posted anything! Admittedly, life has gotten in the way a bit this October - a trip to Chicago to run the Chicago Marathon with my good friend, Jeff, and a trip to Toledo to see my Grandma and visit my brother at BGSU, among other things -  so I haven't been doing as many projects and posts as I would like. However, there must be some sort of voice inside my head telling me to make up for lost time, because I’ve decided to cram in a number of projects between last week and this week. I must be crazy...Is there a full moon tonight?...Sometimes I hate that little voice...Anyway, you know what ‘lots of projects’ means. Lots of things to post about! So, I will be back in a couple days to dish on some typography art I made, and then soon after that with an outdoor house upgrade and some DIY baby shower gifts. But for now, in honor of Halloween, I thought I would share our pumpkin carving activities from this weekend, along with a few tips and tricks my family likes to use.

This weekend was another busy one. We hit up The Brew Kettle on Friday to buy some ingredients so that we could homebrew the second of two beers we plan to have ready for our holiday party in December. (Check out this post for a glimpse into how we brew beer in our kitchen.) On Saturday, my dad came over to help Darren with an outdoor project that we needed to finish before the ground freezes (which is quickly approaching!). Meanwhile, I did a little cleaning and worked on a typographic art gift for Darren’s niece/my goddaughter Olivia’s first birthday. I can’t believe how much that sweet little one has grown over the past year. This is a picture of her from last Halloween, wearing a pumpkin hat I made, just a week after she was born.


We brewed the beer on Sunday morning and I had Olivia’s “art” printed just in time to go to her party. Here’s a little preview (I’ll tell you more about how I made it on Wednesday):


Her parents did a great job with the party – yummy food, an activity for the kids, and lots of people. Afterward, we went to my mom’s house to carve pumpkins. In true Corrie-and-Darren-procrastination-spirit –  because planning ahead is for smart people lame – we waited until the day before Halloween to buy our pumpkins. Bad choice. I/We stopped at 5 different places trying to find pumpkins, and were overjoyed to finally come across some pathetic looking, on-the-verge-of-rotting ones at Giant Eagle. Didn’t matter. It was something to carve. All was made better when we arrived at my mom’s house, where she had everything ready, including drinks and a cozy fire, which our dog, Remy, loves. (To clarify, Remy loves the fire, not the drinks...though she HAS been known to try stick her face in my wine glass when I’m not looking, so maybe the latter is true as well).


My mom tried to get in some pics when she wasn’t doing her own carving. Since most people probably already know how to carve a pumpkin, I don’t feel the need to give you a complete rundown, but here’s the pics with a few tips...pics and tips...that sounds fun.

Look for a pattern online. Better Homes and Gardens has some great free ones for all experience levels, including dog breed patterns, though Remy was offended that they didn’t have a Great Dane. Print out your pattern and hold it up to your pumpkin. Cut inward slits in the places where the pattern is not laying very flat to help form it around your pumpkin. Secure it with tape or pins. Use a pen, pushing really hard, or use something with a point to poke holes in order to trace the pattern onto the pumpkin. Putting transfer paper under your pattern is the easiest, if you have it, and you don’t have to press as hard when you use it.


When you cut out your pumpkin lid, be sure to angle the knife outward from the center of the hole so that there is a slanted ridge for the lid to rest on when you put it back in place. Otherwise, if you cut straight up and down, you risk your lid falling through your pumpkin. Take it from Darren. He had to rig his up with some toothpicks. Rookie mistake.


For a sweet smelling surprise when you light your pumpkin, sprinkle cinnamon on the underside of your lid after you cut off the goopies. Goopies is the technical name, you know.


It's worth picking through the goopies to pull out all the pumpkin seeds - think of it as a bonus snack. Lay them on a baking sheet to dry a bit, then mix in a bowl with 2 teaspoons of melted butter (or olive oil) and spices. Try chili powder with cumin or cayenne for spicy, cinnamon and brown sugar for sweet, or just plain ol' seasoned salt. Spread them back out on the baking sheet in a thin layer and roast them in the oven at 300 degrees for 40 minutes, or until the seeds are light brown.

If you’re unsure of your carving abilities, pick something with simple shapes, like Darren’s owl. It wasn’t too challenging, but turned out super awesome. He was seriously doubting his carving abilities, but I think he did a great job. And now he has renewed confidence for next year.


Or, if your eyes are bigger than your carving skills, you want to spend a couple hours getting to know your pumpkin, or don’t mind ending up with a claw hand by the time you’re done, pick a more complicated pattern with small openings, like I did. Overachiever mistake.


Ironically, the very last piece I carved out caused some other thinner sections to detach. If this happens, don't despair - you can use pieces of toothpicks to re-stabilize them.


Maybe carving out pumpkin chunks isn’t your idea of a good time. You can always ‘shade’ your pumpkin by just cutting away the outer skin and a little bit of the flesh. The light will still shine through, but with a softer glow that creates a different effect. Most of the pattern I carved two years ago was done using this method.


Enjoy it as much as you can before it rots, or in our case, before the squirrels eat it! These were what my mom and sister carved.


Feel free to share links/pictures of YOUR pumpkins – it’s so fun to see what everyone made! Happy haunting tonight!


2

Halloween Decorations & Printables

Posted by Corrie on 6:58 PM in , ,
It's fall ya'll! And boy has October come in with a bang. Here in Cleveland it was a rainy, windy, miserably cold weekend. Who am I kidding...that pretty much sums up the past two weeks. Regardless, I used this gross-weather-weekend as a good opportunity to put in some overtime at work, cook up some potato leek soup, and then bust out the Halloween decorations! The start of October officially means Halloween in my book, and as one of my favorite holidays - a close second only to Christmas - I wanted to get the decorations up asap. (Darren has been asking "When are you going to put up the fall decorations?" for about 2 weeks now, so I guess 'asap' might not be the right description...) Plus, I saw that one of my favorite blogs, The Lettered Cottage, was hosting a fall link party, so I thought it would be fun to participate. You know how I need extra motivation sometimes. (If you want to see what a REAL blog looks like, check out Layla and Kevin over on The Lettered Cottage. Not only do awesome house projects, but they have some mad photography skills. Their talent puts me to shame.)

The Lettered Cottage

Anyway, I got D to bring down my one and lonely only box of halloween decorations from the attic. Some people like cute little pumpkins and scarecrows as decorations around Halloween time, which can be fun and kid-friendly. But Darren and I? No sir. Our objective is to scare the crap out of kids. We hope to one day win the Lifetime Achievement Award for Halloween Scariness (if one ever existed) by gradually turning our place into the creepiest haunted house on this side of the Cuyahoga. I emphasize gradually because, honestly, do you know how easy it is to blow all of your money on Halloween decorations? That ish is expensive. Which is why we try to buy decorations AFTER Halloween when it all goes on clearance. But what fun is buying decorations after Halloween when you're soooo excited to decorate now? It's not. Which is why I try to find DIY projects and other things around the house that I can use to make me feel like I have something new to put up. Such is the life of cheap frugal new homeowners.

After I pulled everything out of the box, I realized I only had enough decorations to really do the mantel and the dining room table. Kind of lame, but I'll take it for now. I started with 5 kraft paper skulls, which I coffee stained last fall to make them look old and textured; a creepy, furry rat; a bust statue of a vampire we picked up on clearance a few years ago; some candles; and a spider I also made last fall by painting styrofoam balls and attaching black wire for legs.



When we were up in the attic looking for the Halloween box, I spotted some grey corbels my mom gave me awhile ago for a future unknown project and thought they might work as candle 'holders.' I threw them up on either side of the mirror and scattered some plain candles I already had.


Since everything was kind of small-scale and spaced out across the mantel, it looked pretty empty. On an experimental whim, I grabbed a yard of burlap and a roll of fall colored ribbon I've had sitting among my craft stuff for close to a year. The burlap acted as a nice base to anchor all the small items, and the ribbon created a nice colorful 'flow' between all of the objects.


Ahh. Better. It sort of came together in a forced and collected-from-all-over-the-house kind of way. You could call it something from nothing I guess.


Despite my best efforts to arrange things at different heights, the mirror still looked really plain. It is pretty huge, after all. (That's what she said.) I decided to make some sort of banner to drape over it to break up the space a bit. Since I was in my pajamas didn't feel like running to the store, I looked around the internet and my house for some more supplies to throw something together. I figured twine would be a nice rustic replacement for string and found this guy from Women's Day via a Google image search:


I liked that they used newspaper as the background and decided to do something similar, but with newspaper as the foreground and triangle letters instead, a la the bunting on this wreath over at Pretty Ditty:


She had a printable PDF, but since our printer is out of ink, that wasn't going to work. Newspaper is pretty thin, so I figured I would pull up a cool font on my computer and trace over it on the newspaper. Kind of like a shoddy light box of sorts. First, I wanted to figure out how wide to make the triangles so I could adjust the font size on my computer to match. To come up with the triangle size, I determined the length of twine I wanted by draping it over the mirror and cutting it - 40 inches. Since I wanted my banner to spell "beware," which is 6 letters, I decided that 5 inches wide would be enough for each letter to take up space. This allowed for extra width to account for black paper backing behind the newspaper, but not wide enough to look crowded hanging from the twine. This is all very technical, can you tell? I pretty much eyeballed it. I wanted my triangles longer than wide, so I randomly chose 7 inches as the length of each side. Then, I made a template on some white paper (click here for a PDF version) and traced six triangles on non-color, print only sections of the newspaper.


After cutting out the triangles, I found a font I liked on my computer - QuentinCaps - and enlarged it. Holding a triangle up to the screen, I enlarged the font to a size I liked. My 'light box' idea worked really well and I could see the letter perfectly through the newspaper. Using a pencil, I traced over one letter per triangle, shading in the dark areas. I just carefully held the newspaper against the screen instead of taping it, because I was worried about the tape ruining my screen (and not tearing the newspaper upon removal).


Then I colored the letters in with a black sharpie.


When all was said and done, I had these:


All that was left to do was glue them to some black scrapbook paper, cut them out leaving about 1/4" border (eyeballing it of course), poke two holes in the top of each triangle and string the twine through. Clearly it would've been much quicker to just print the letters onto the newspaper, but I made do with what I had.

Ahh, much better. It makes good use use of the empty space, and it adds a nice spooky touch to the decorations....And it was free. I love free. And here's the whole shebang:


Pardon the glare in the first pic and the terrible quality of the second. I took the pictures at night and we have terrible lighting in our living room.

One other quick project I did was to make these mice silhouettes from Martha Stewart to put on our stairs and baseboard (picture courtesy of Martha...my mice aren't up yet).


She made hers out of paper, but if I was going to spend all sorts of time cutting out mice, you can bet your cajones I didn't want something flimsy that would be destroyed in a few weeks, only for me to make them all over again next year. So, I made mine from black craft foam that I had bought last fall. The stuff is super cheap and way more durable than paper.


 I printed out the mice templates (which you can get here) and traced them with pen onto the foam.


Cue some crazy cutting skills while watching TV and I ended up with these guys.


Plus a whole bunch more, some of which I still need to cut out.

So, that sums up some of our Halloween stuff this year for a total cost of maybe $2 worth of black craft foam (which I already had, so technically it was free.) Plus, reusing the newspaper also made my project kind of 'green,' which always gives us the warm-and-fuzzies. Hopefully this has inspired you to look through your house for some things you could repurpose as decorations (extra fabric perhaps?), and if anything, at least you can use the free printables if you're feeling a little artsy fartsy. Here are the links to them again:

A PDF version of my 'Beware' banner 
Martha Stewart's silhouette mice
Pretty Ditty's Halloween bunting

Are there any fun Halloween projects you're making this year? Maybe a costume or some creepy decorations? Or maybe you're more into the fall harvest stuff, which is nice because it lasts through Thanksgiving. Let's hear all about it! 

Happy Haunting!

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