FOAM AND DISPLAY BOARD:
· 9” x 12” Mini Bi-Fold Foam Board

X-ACTO:
· Designer Series Gripster Craft Knife
· Designer Series 12” Metal Ruler
· Designer Series 12” X 12” Self Healing Mat
· Designer Series 8” Scissors
· Designer Series 5” Precision Tip Scissors
· Designer Series Basic Shape Templates
· Designer Series Decorative Shape Templates

PAINTERS:
· Painters Bright Colors
· Painters Sherbet Swirl

CRAFTBOND:
· Dot Runner
· Foam Mounting Tape
· Thin Medium Glue Spots
· All Purpose Glue Stick
· Quick Dry Dual Tip Glue Pen
· Elmer’s Designer Tape

Just leave a comment below telling me what awesome project (holiday project???)  this box would inspire you to do, and by random selection you can win your own box. Tweeting about this also counts as a second entry, as they show up in the comments as well. Be sure to stop by and visit the Elmer’s Craft it! facebook site, too!

{Contest is Closed! Stay tuned for the winner as soon as I’m not on death’s door with this cold…!}

I do have a bunch of cool pics to show you guys from halloween (I assume you still want to see the awesome food and costumes, even if I am 2 months late?), plus some cool stuff for xmas coming up.  I’ll really try to be better this month!  I also have a cool giveaway coming up, as soon as I put the post together, so stay tuned for that.

And I’ve been trying to get in shape (a better shape than round) and I’ve been working out 4 times a week (that’s going from 0 times per week, so you see it is a bit of a change)–I’ve been doing FitWit for the last 2 months, which I’m really liking… well, as far as Dot could like anything related to exercise.  And now, this month I’m try to actually add eating healthy into to mix and see if I can lose five pounds by the end of the year.

Oh yeah, I promised a recipe:

Speaking of eating healthy, I posted a great roasted chicken and roasted cauliflower dinner over on Foodwhirl — super easy and tasty and healthy.  If you have any recipes I should check out, let me know, or post them to Foodwhirl too!

And book recommendations:

It seems to be the fashion these days, at least in my intown Atlanta circles, that everyone belongs to a wine… er I mean book… club.  So I figured you guys might like to know what I’ve been reading, and maybe you have some suggestions too?  Cuz that would be awesome, I need some new books to read!  :)

So for book club, we’ve read both of these lately, and both of which I’ve enjoyed:
Gone Girl: A Novel     Where’d You Go, Bernadette: A Novel

Very different books, but both excellent reads…  And good ‘book club’ books with lots of discussion possibilities.

Not for book club, but because I needed more stuff to read and libraries exist, I’ve also been reading this:

(The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making)

Which I’m totally unsure of how to describe, but it inspired the title of this post. It reminds me of Alice in Wonderland (or maybe the Wizard of Oz), and I read it, then promptly started reading it to my 7 yr old son for a bedtime story (although the language is definitely on the high end of child reading comprehension). I have no idea if you would like it, but read the first page, and you’ll know if it’s your kind of book.

I’m a big fan of Young Adult Fiction, so I’ve also recently read The Maze Runner which was an interesting apocalyptic YA book with a boy hero, and The Scorpio Races which I also liked.  And because I managed to check it out on my Kindle from the library (which you can’t ever find any books ‘in stock’) I got The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which I’d never heard of, but it was a pretty interesting fantasy book with a female heroine.  Not a ‘oh my god awesome’ book, but a nice read.

So, you have any suggestions for me?

PS as always, support Dabbled for nothing by using my affiliate links above if you wanna buy these books!

It’s a little simpler too, if you’re just starting with your photoshop skills, it’s a great one to start with.  The principle is the same, take old vintage photos and in this case, combine two to make one creepy photo which contains a ghost!

Head over to Fed Ex Office blog to see all the details on how to make them yourself, or if you don’t have time or inclination to make them yourself, you can download the sample printable photos!

Update: Related technique and more downloads: Ghost Portraits!

Did you know Great Aunt Gertrude was a zombie?  Or Ancient Uncle Elrod was a tad undead?  Unfortunately for my Halloween décor, I don’t really have ghouls in the family.  But we can fake it with a little photo manipulation.

These creepy portraits will look great hung on a wall, or in small frames on your serving table, at any scary Halloween party.  You can either design your own, using the instructions provided here, or you can download the set provided here.  Then just have them printed in whatever size to fit your frames, at your local print shop on on your home computer.

How to make your own creepy vintage photos

Supplies:

• Photo-editing program.  These instructions assume you are working in Photoshop.
• Vintage photo image files.  Portraits work best, and the larger the better if you want to print big versions for your walls.  You can scan photos of your own relatives, or you can find public domain photos online. [You can find photos from public archives like the Library of Congress with no copyright restrictions here.]
• Skulls:  You’ll need a transparent photographed skull image. The simplest way to get the skull you need is to use a skull themed Photoshop brush set, of which several can be found online for free.

Method:

This is how to add a creepy skull effect to your photo.  There are of course many other possible spooky details you can add.  More detailed instructions can be found below the photos.

1. Open your photo file.
2. Create a new layer, and determine what skull size and shape will best fit your portrait’s head.  Place skull in new layer.  It should have enough transparency to see through it to the portrait layer.  If not, you may need to increase the transparency of the skull layer.
3. Line up the skull with the portrait head as well as you can.  Resize and move as necessary to get the mouth and eyes of the skull lined up with your portrait.
4. Next, fit the skull to the face.  Select the skull.  Under the Transform menu, use Warp.  Drag the dots around to fit the skull to the angle of the face.  In this example, I dragged the right jawline of the skull out to better match the portrait jawline, and pulled in the left side of the skull.  I also moved the nose to match up with the portrait nose.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you need the eyes, mouth, nose and jaw to match up as well as possible for best effect.  Don’t worry about the outline of the skull, we’ll be erasing that in the next step.
5. Finally, erase the outside of the skull.  Use your eraser (a soft feathered brush) to erase anywhere the skull exceeds the face (like on the left side in this example) and pretty much all the edges of the skull image, leaving the features intact.  You can also erase any shading that doesn’t fit with the photo.

Once you have your final files, just take them to your local FedEx Office and have them color printed in whatever size you need to fit your décor.

Download the Files

Want the look, without the work?  Click here to download a zip file of the images featured in this post, plus a few extras.

Six years. Long enough to have a baby and raise him/her until they are school ready. Long enough to date, get married and launch a career. Six years is long enough to remodel a house, launch a business, go to graduate school or change the course of your life. Six years is a substantial commitment and you may not believe this, but: I have been blogging for six years.

I will give pause for you to roll your eyes. You should. And you might think I am about to pontificate about my ability to own a soapbox, talk incessantly and blog blog blog into the horizon. Yet: there are more pressing matters, such as Halloween. And most importantly: what fancy, and wicked awesome drinks you will serve your party-comers.

The reason ‘six years’ is relevant is simply this: one of my most popular posts over the course of SIX years is my Dead Spider Martini. Apparently I have a penchant for Halloween cocktails. My tagline does state: janelle is known to wield knives, pitchforks and martinis. All things considered, I have a reputation for [inspired] drinks to uphold.

My quick two cents on Halloween cocktails:

• my quite famous Drunken Spider (or as I sometimes call it the Dead Spider Martini; it’s the hairy legs coming out of the glass that everyone loves).
• Purple People Eater
• Mummy Juice (when NOT Halloween I affectionately refer to this as Mommy Juice). For Halloween: wrap the glass in gauze.
• this year, I wanted to offer top shelf, classic Gin and/or Vodka martinis. Which means: a clear drink. Which then means: Halloween is captured in the garnish… the devil is in the details;).

Devil’s Martini: Up. Chilled. Blood-stained dark as hell olives.

Vodka or gin
Vermouth if required (I usually chill the glass, then put in a tsp. or so of vermouth, swirl it around and pour in well-chilled/ice-muddled vodka or gin)

Chilled, muddled, strained and served up with skewers of black olives (I filled mine with slices of red peppadews).Six years. Long enough to have a baby and raise him/her until they are school ready. Long enough to date, get married and launch a career. Six years is long enough to remodel a house, launch a business, go to graduate school or change the course of your life. Six years is a substantial commitment and you may not believe this, but: I have been blogging for six years.

I will give pause for you to roll your eyes. You should. And you might think I am about to pontificate about my ability to own a soapbox, talk incessantly and blog blog blog into the horizon. Yet: there are more pressing matters, such as Halloween. And most importantly: what fancy, and wicked awesome drinks you will serve your party-comers.

The reason ‘six years’ is relevant is simply this: one of my most popular posts over the course of SIX years is my Dead Spider Martini. Apparently I have a penchant for Halloween cocktails. My tagline does state: janelle is known to wield knives, pitchforks and martinis. All things considered, I have a reputation for [inspired] drinks to uphold.

My quick two cents on Halloween cocktails:

• my quite famous Drunken Spider (or as I sometimes call it the Dead Spider Martini; it’s the hairy legs coming out of the glass that everyone loves).
• Purple People Eater
• Mummy Juice (when NOT Halloween I affectionately refer to this as Mommy Juice). For Halloween: wrap the glass in gauze.
• this year, I wanted to offer top shelf, classic Gin and/or Vodka martinis. Which means: a clear drink. Which then means: Halloween is captured in the garnish… the devil is in the details;).

Devil’s Martini: Up. Chilled. Blood-stained dark as hell olives.

Vodka or gin
Vermouth if required (I usually chill the glass, then put in a tsp. or so of vermouth, swirl it around and pour in well-chilled/ice-muddled vodka or gin)

Chilled, muddled, strained and served up with skewers of black olives (I filled mine with slices of red peppadews).

This fun costume comes to us from the wonderful illustrator, and all around nice guy, Eric Barclay.  Check out his daughter as Mary Poppins!  With a scarf knitted by her aunt.  Wonderfully recognizable and easy to pull off with a few props, I think!

This would also be a great costume if your child’s school does “dress up as book characters day” on Halloween.

Thanks to Eric for letting me share this here!

What about you?

Have you started Halloween costume planning this year yet?

The curse of Halloween food blogging is that many of my Halloween delicacies, made up for the Halloween party, are done at the last minute.  So I can’t write them up very well before Halloween, and it seems silly to post the recipes AFTER Halloween.  So I was noticing that some of my really cool Halloween treats are relegated to quick photo posts, rather than giving them the treatment they deserve.  To fix that, here is the ‘how-to’ on my world famous Mozzarella Eyeballs, classy enough for the fanciest Halloween dinner party!

Recipe/Technique: How to make Marinated Mozzarella Eyeballs

Supplies:

• Big firm olives (black & green).  Try the olive bar at your local grocery, or you can go for the canned stuff.  The olives need to be firm, not squishy.  Jarred black olives work perfected fine for the pupil.
• A large diameter drinking straw (I find McDonalds straws to be the perfect size) .
• Marinated mini mozzarella balls.  I get mine at Trader Joe’s.
• Optional: jarred red pepper slices.

My original version of this just used sliced pimento stuffed green olives, but then I saw the Evil Mad Scientists and their Eyeball Caprese, and adapted that technique to my appetizer.  You basically use the olives to make your nice rounded iris and pupil.  For the most rounded, slice of the end of a green olive, then use your straw to punch a hole in the center.  Then slide of a piece of black olive, and use the straw to punch out a plug of black.  Then place the black piece in the hole of your green olive.  If it does stay level with the green, you can use a little cream cheese stuffed in the open end of the olive to hold the black in place.  You can also do slices off the side of the green olive, but be aware they will be slightly oblong.  you can see I did a little of both for mine in the photo.

So, the how-to and the recipe:

The recipe is super simple, and surprising healthy, as far as dips go.  It’s popular with both kids (my 7 year old loves it) and adults!

Ingredients:

• 1 package Cream or Neufchâtel cheese – leave a room temperature to soften.
• 1 6-8oz piece of salmon, cooked (Just sprinkle with salt & pepper, and cook in whatever manner you want.  You could grill it, or put in under the broiler, or cook it stove top)
• 2 Tablespoons Sour Cream
• Optional:  Sriracha sauce, or Tobasco, to taste.
• Lemon juice

Remove skin from the salmon, and break up your salmon into small pieces.  The finer your salmon is, the more it will look like brains, but honestly, I prefer to keep the chunks a little larger.

Stir up your cheese and sour cream, and add your salmon and sraracha, and a few squirts of fresh lemon juice to brighten the flavor.

The next step is to mold it into a brain shape.

Form two balls, one for each half of brain, and press together. Use wet hands to smooth the surface. Use a chopstick to etch out the lines of the brain using a picture for reference. Use wet hands to smooth.

Place in the middle of your favorite silver platter, add slices of french bread or crackers, and serve to your favorite Zombie!

So way back in 2008, one of the first big “experiments in craft” I did for Dabbled was what I called the Shrinky Dink Test Lab.  I had run across the idea for using #6 plastic to make homemade shrink plastic (aka ‘Shrinky Dinks’) at various places on the crafty webs, but I decided to delve a little deeper.  I started with a basic project (Doodle Charm Earrings), and that led to other questions.  What about coloring with other materials like colored pencils?  How do you seal your plastic afterwards so the marker doesn’t rub off?  And successes and failures in all this also led to interesting effects that could be achieved.

So flash forward to 2012.   Blogs are prettier and fancier now, and more professional looking.  We have Pinterest and Facebook and all kinds of visually focused sharing tools.  The technology is cooler now.  Dabbled gets a bunch more traffic than it did back then.  I ran across a really cute tutorial to make a shrinky bracelet and it made me look back  at  these old Shrinky Dink Test Lab posts and they just look so ….old.   Well, I’m not going to totally redo them or anything, but I did think that perhaps an index of them was in order, for better referencing in the future, and maybe some pretty graphics, too –in case you guys..um…I don’t know… wanna Pin this? ;)

Part 1: HOW TO- Doodle Charms – Jewelry from recycled plastic

This section is a good basic tutorial on how to make shrinky jewerly from old takeout containers, with just sharpies, scissors, a hole punch, and a bit of creativity.  Be sure to read the comments, there are extra tips there about how long to heat them, and whether there are issues with fumes, and some other good points.

Part 2: What would happen if..? (The Shrinky Dink Test Lab)

This section is the first of the experiments.  We cover several cool ideas, like drawing on the front and back of the plastic.  Also we tried several ways of sealing the charm, which produced different effects.  You could totally incorporate these effects into your design.  The comments include several good suggestions for other methods of sealing the shrinky.

Part 3: More experimentation in the Shrinky Dink Test Lab

The second day of odd experiments included what would happen if you sealed the shrinky PRIOR to shrinking, as well as a really neat effect using spraypaint.  We also shrink non-flat plastic (the side of a to-go box) and make a ring out of it.  And we combine several of the techniques to make a giant suncatcher, seeing just how big a shrinky we can make!  Finally, we use colored pencils, rather than Sharpies, to color our design.

Part 4 of the Shrinky Dink Test lab: Successful sealing.. maybe

This is the post where the commenters really come through.  Not only do we have the (mixed) results of my sealing using polyurethane, the commenter pipe up with a bunch of other solutions, and several do their own tests to really give us all the data.  If you’re interested in sealing, this is the post to read (including the comments).

Shrinky Dinkies – Special Edition : Make Wraparound Wine Glass Markers

This is not really part of the test lab, but was a fun project tutorial to make temporary wine glass markers.  Plus the idea of doing a shrinky making party with your friends!

Some Other Shrinky Projects:

• Eco-friendly Charm Bracelet
• Christmas Ornament Template and Tutorial

Don’t Blink!!  

It’s never too early to start planning for Halloween, especially if your ambitions are this big.

Check out this incredible build by HalloweenForum poster MacabreRob.

He built not one, but TWO weeping angels (of Doctor Who fame), and describes the entire process – from building the body, to molding the face.   LOVE it… I was thinking what a cool project building an angel would be, but I don’t think I’m up for anything quite this intense for our halloween decor.

Maybe we could figure out some way to fake this?  Any ideas ? :)

[More Halloween]