Finally Finished Pumpkins

After way too long I finally finished all of the pumpkins that I was working on. They were finished up just a few days after Halloween so I guess that still counts as timely. The large pumpkin has eight or nine different velcro faces to change out. While I definitely wish that I'd been able to finish these sooner I'm really happy with how they came out.

I'm thinking about sending the second largest one to Alex as part of his crazy belated birthday present. I've had a stack of stuff to send to him sitting on a bookshelf for about a month. I also realized today that I've only got a month and a half until Christmas and I haven't even bought the supplies I would need to make the ridiculous amount of stuff that I want to make. Yikes. I'm going to sit down today and make a list of what I want to make and then cut that list in half to maybe resemble what I'll have time to actually make. Have you started your Christmas crafting? Maybe next year will be the year that we finally make a list in January and make something each month so that come Christmas we're swimming with finished stuff to give and totally stress free. Just thinking of it sounds so nice and so totally impossible.

Pumpkin Faces in the Works

I've made some progress on the pumpkin faces. I totally love the big, angry mouth on this one. Since taking these photos I did finish the stems on all three of them and got the felt faces glued down on two of them. I'm hoping to finish these up and get the pumpkin with the Velcro, interchangeable faces done this week. Craft Blog is having an Halloween Contest so I'd like to enter that into it. The stuff on their blog blows me away so I doubt that I'll win anything but it would be pretty exciting to get something finished and entered. Maddy, you should totally enter the Gohan costume that you made!!

The tiniest pumpkin is only about 3 inches wide and maybe 2 inches tall and I think it may be my favorite. I carried it around in the pocket of my hoodie the other day just because I could.

I'm also making this strange little bat. The eyes are felt ones from Michael's and right now it just has a paper template for a mouth but it's going to be cut from white felt.  It has little black felt ears and black felt wings. For some reason I really liked the sad bat face. I tried making it a happy bat but it just wasn't nearly as cute to me.

Now that Halloween is almost past it's that stressful time when I have to sit down and think about Christmas. I've got a couple of ideas floating around for things to make but I need to get it all written out and face the truth of whether or not I have time to make all the things that I want to make.

Garden Zombies

Before we moved from Brooklyn some friends gave us a crazy zombie lawn ornament as a going away present. We've been so caught up with trying to make the inside of the house livable that we haven't spent much time on the outside so the zombie has been boxed since we got here. If I'm being honest, I also didn't want to have our first impression in a new place be that we're the kind of crazy people who have a zombie in the yard in July. Although we're totally those people.

Anyway, now that it's Halloween we can bring out the zombie without feeling weird. Maybe we just won't put it away afterward. I'll stick a Santa hat on it next week and it'll still be appropriate. So here is our badass zombie. Ready to scare the trick or treaters who won't be coming since we live in the sticks. Oh, and please disregard the filthy fence. Pretend that it didn't always look that way and, instead, we took our pristine white fence and aged it just for the holiday. Yeah, that's it.

Pumpkins in Progress

 

A few years ago I made a housewarming present for some family who moved into their new home in October.  Since I love Halloween I crocheted a pumpkin and gave it a variety of interchangeable faces.  I loved the project so much that I made another one for a friends' birthday the following year.  I've thought about the project a lot since I first made it and have always wanted to make another for myself and so I finally sat down to make one and ended up making four.  I started with the largest one and then once I'd finished I thought it might be cute to make a smaller one with a fixed face instead of the velcro faces.  And then when that was done I thought it would be cute if it were even smaller and then when that one was done it happened again and I made the fourth punpkin and now I don't think I can get any smaller than that.  I just need to add stems and faces and get these little guys set up around the house.

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I'm also trying to make some little bats to go along with these so I've got one of those in progress but there's no photos because it's not very photogenic right now.  It's just a stuffed black ball.  I found some cool felt eyes at Michael's that I'm going to add and maybe some little white felt fangs and then some large felt wings attached to the back.

Ideally, I'd like to start making stuff like this for my Etsy shop but it's so hard to find time.  Anyone have any advice on how to work a crafting business in with a full-time job?