My FedEx Out of Office blog post is up for March, and I almost forgot to share it with you guys before St. Patrick’s Day!   This is a fun printable (with Dot artwork, naturally!) that your kids can fold up and have fun sharing with their friends.

You remember these from grade school, right?  You would make them out of a piece of notebook paper, then play with them telling fortunes until they were confiscated by a mean teacher!  We always just called them fortune tellers, but according to the internet, they are also known as Cootie Catchers.

I’ve got the printable and the instructions on how to fold it up, if you’re a little rusty, over at FedEx Out of Office.

EDIT: Apparently the FedEx blog is kaput, so here are the instructions! 

Nothing is what it seems…
Top: Sushi? – I made this last year for an April Fool party, and again at halloween (instructions)
Middle: A cupcake?
Eggs and Toast?
Bottom: Veggies and Fish Sticks?
Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup?

Here are a few more ideas:

• Mashed Potato cupcakes
• A Sundae that isn’t what it seems
• A Dessert Hotdog
• April Fools Lasagna
• Is that really cereal and milk?
• Hoosier Homemade shares these ‘nuggets & fries’ and other ideas.

Related:

• Sweet Treats too cool to eat…a photo roundup
• Faux Foods — Yummies made of crochet, clay, felt, knit, etc

(Originally published 2009, updated with more goodies 2013)

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.

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?

Summer Inspirations – Cool things to do this summer…

[prw username=”dorsner” boardname=”summer-inspirations” maxfeeds=”9″ divname=”myList” printtext=”0″ target=”newwindow” useenclosures=”yes” thumbwidth=”170″ thumbheight=”170″ showfollow=”medium”]

Direct Links: Citrus Vodka |   Personal sized baked oatmeal  | Little Monster Birthday Party – Watermelon Fruit Monster | Pop Rocks Rimmed Cocktails!  | Oreo Popsicle Recipe | Edible Cookie Dough Bracelet! | Beaded Crochet Bracelet Tutorial | Strawberry chocolate jello shots |  Guiness Ice Cream Car Bomb Sundae

How to add a Pinterest Pin Board to a Blog Post (WP)

This was not overly obvious, and required a bit of research, but basically there is an RSS feed for any of your pin boards on Pinterest.  Example: http://pinterest.com/dorsner/summer-inspirations/ board’s RSS feed is http://pinterest.com/dorsner/summer-inspirations/rss . Once you know that you have a feed, you’re halfway there, and there are probably multiple ways to handle it.

I took the quick way out and snagged the Pinterest RSS Widget plugin so I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.   Conveniently enough, not only does the plugin allow you to add a widget to your sidebar with any Pinterest feed, they also include a shortcode that makes it super easy to embed the pin board directly into a post.

So for the board above I used the following shortcode – replace the curly brackets } with square brackets ], obviously.  The syntax is pretty self explanatory, but the explanation for each field is here.  The username is your Pinterest name, the boardname is the name of the board.  Max feeds is the number of posts you want to show.   The divname is for styling (I didn’t worry about that here).  Printtext determines if you want to include text- I didn’t.  I set the thumbwidth/height to 170 to make 3 across, nicely spaced.

{prw username="dorsner" boardname="summer-inspirations" maxfeeds="9"

divname="myList" printtext="0" target="newwindow" useenclosures="yes"

thumbwidth="170" thumbheight="170" showfollow="medium"}

And that’s really all there is to it.  It was easy to do, so I will probably do it again sometime, as a good way to collect links.  I know there are mixed feelings in the crafty blogging world about Pinterest, and I’ll admit I haven’t really done much with it yet, but I do think it does have some excellent potential.

For some reason Mother’s Day is always about a *light* brunch, yeesh -what if your mom likes super-heavy fried chicken+mashed potatoes+biscuits like me?? Hm. Whatever – tradition says dainty, light ‘brunch, brunch, brunch’ so here are a few of my fave sweet brunch recipes. (You can always serve it with a side of fried chicken.)

Go get them all here:  Mother’s Day Brunch

 

I love this idea – which would be perfect for a brunch, especially if mom is a fan of bacon:

At Can You Stay For Dinner:And no, I’ll never again share a photo of two sweet ‘n’ gritty cornbread pancakes acting as the bread in which I stuffed crisp applewood smoked bacon strips, thick slices of vine ripened tomatoes, crispy green leaf lettuce, and crumbly blue cheese.

I just won’t, okay?

And I’m not going to tell you how delicious it was.

Go read the whole thing and get the recipe: Cornbread BLTs

This is a fabulous idea!

Check out this adorable ‘carrot’ filled with egg salad from Hungry Happenings– a fun addition to an easter brunch, maybe?

From the site: There is only one spring day that starts off with your family running around the yard in search of decorated eggs. Easter Sunday is quite unique in that respect.  After our Easter egg hunts we have always gathered up our decorated eggs and whisked them off to the kitchen to add some Miracle Whip before turning them into deviled eggs or egg salad.  It’s a simple recipe, just two ingredients, but one I still enjoy even though my palate has been expanded immensely over the years. I know everyone has their own favorite recipe for these classic dishes and am certain that many (most, maybe) of you enjoy them on Easter.

Go read the whole thing and see how to make it..:  Carrot Crescents Filled with Egg Salad

Love this idea from Duhlicious!

Jello Easter Eggs made in the shell… and plus the idea of making them into Jello shots?  Awesomeness.  Will have to try these!

Go read the whole thing and get the instructions: Jello Easter Eggs