24 Olive Street

Halloween 2015

Another one in the books! This year we had cold, windy, rainy weather...blah.

Thankfully the rain held out for trick or treating and only lightly sprinkled. But the wind...oh the wind...it was cold!!!

We didn't even get to decorating pumpkins until Saturday afternoon.

Yes...on Halloween! I didn't even get mine carved :(

I'm thinking I might carve out a Thanksgiving pumpkin. Maybe leaves or something??

My son was the only one that had a carved pumpkin. But since he has a broken wrist he couldn't carve it. So he drew the design and my hubby carved it. My daughters painted theirs.

For Halloween this year we had a cat, Hatbox Ghost, & Sally.

This is about the best photo I got of my oldest. She had friends over & they went trick or treating together so I tried not to be the lame mom that was taking gobs of photos ;)

For my son's Hatbox Ghost costume we got the gloves at the Halloween store, coat was from a thrift shop, hat was from his Mad Hatter costume a few years back, the hatbox was a paper mache box from Hobby Lobby that we painted & added a handle, and the walking stick we already had.

I also made Addie's Sally costume. It was a little tricky and I goofed in a few spots (that thankfully aren't noticeable!) but I was so tickled to see how cute she looked in it!! The sleeves are actually tights that I cut & added stitches to. And yes, I sewed all of those stitches on her dress!

By the way, liquid eyeliner (while expensive) is perfect for drawing fine lines like Sally's stitches!!

And you can't have Sally without Jack ;)

I just love when Halloween falls on a weekend! So much less stress about getting things done since the kids are home from school.

And now that Halloween is over I'm going to pop in a Christmas movie & start planning for Thanksgiving (and Christmas of course!).

trick or treat!

The fall season is upon us. And with that lots of seasonal treats! Michelle here and I have a fun & easy way to package up those treats.

I found some treat sacks at my local craft store and stamped those adorable candy corn stamps with Versamark. I love using Versamark because it gives a great watermark image on your projects - great for backgrounds.

After that I took some small doilies, jute, and that cute dragon stamp to decorate my bag. I also punched out a few tags & attached them at the top for decoration and to keep my bags closed.

And that's it!! Cute treat bags all ready to give out to your little trick or treaters!

The great thing about this project is that there are so many options with all of the Sweet Stamp Shop stamps. You could easily make treat bags for Christmas, birthday, parties, whatever!

Stamp sets used: Dragon, Fall Into Christmas

Be sure to follow Sweet Stamp Shop on Facebook and Instagram for more inspiration!

the day after

I love Halloween but man, I'm always so exhausted afterward!

Late night on the 30th finishing up costumes, getting things ready for class parties, making treats, whew...

And what's great about when it's all over...there's still the Thanksgiving & Christmas seasons to look forward to!

I didn't get any decorating done (boo!) but I did manage to get my Jack Skellington cupcakes made. I used my favorite cake & frosting recipe along with Wilton black icing (which, as far as black icings go, tasted pretty good). I was not about to try & make black icing...I end up putting so much coloring in it that it tastes nasty :( To make the smaller lines I actually piped some into a ziploc baggie & snipped a corner off.

In hindsight I should probably have not put Ben's pumpkin in the porch...2 days in the sun and the small parts in his design dried up. Oh well...

For my kids' parties at school Addie & I dressed up as Dorothy & the scarecrow (her costume from last year). She loved my makeup :)

After school it was time to get ready for trick or treating!!

This year we had Katniss Everdeen (after the games :) ), a zombie Jedi, Jessie, Rick Grimes & a walker.

Addie had so much fun trick or treating. I love this age...the age when they really start to figure out what Halloween is all about :)

Every house she went to she kept saying over and over again "Di Dou!!" (thank you), "I see you! Bye!!"

Oh man, so stinkin' cute!

And now...time to start getting ready for Thanksgiving and Christmas!!!

it's dark out!

It's barely 5pm and already dark out. I know some people don't like the time change but I do. Makes me want to snuggle up on the couch with some hot chocolate and a good movie!

The Vingage Finds show was great yesterday. Met a lot of great people and had a few booth neighbors that I chatted with all day. I'll share a few pics tomorrow, need to download them from my phone. I wanted to share them via facebook yesterday but I had absolutely no signal out there.

But until then I thought I'd share a few pics from Halloween. We had an 80s girl, a werewolf, and Dorothy.

Whenever Ben put on that mask & growled at Addie she growled right back. hehe This coming from the girl who had stranger anxiety at 4 months old!

And Dorothy had her not-so-cowardly lion :)

Addie also dressed up earlier in the day for the kids school parties as a pumpkin. Btw, I've had that costume since my oldest daughter wore it for her 2nd Halloween :)

I usually make mummy dogs for dinner but this year I did mummy pizzas instead.

They were a big hit...and yummy!

We did a lot of trick or treating this year.

I think we were out for 2 1/2 hours.

Addie made it through most of it but she started getting exhausted & cranky. I think the school parties wore her out. So around 7:30 I dropped her off at home where my hubby was handing out candy & traded her for the cowardly lion - aka Tucker - so he could come out for a bit :)

The kids got a ton - and I mean a TON - of candy. Even some ful sized candy bars which they were totally siked about. In a week or 2 I'll be sending my hubby to work with a big bowl of candy to put on his desk :)

And now it's time to put the Halloween stuff away & start thinking about Thanksgiving & Christmas!

what's been going on

Can you believe tomorrow is Halloween?? Wow, it crept up on me again. Funny how that always happens!

I feel like I'm playing "catch up" after being sick the last few days. I'm trying to wrangle up my records from my dr back in GA and find a new dr here because my Crohn's has been on a rampage the last few days. I'm really hoping and praying that I'm not developing a bowel obstruction again because I'm having some similar symptoms as the last time. I can't tell you how much I'm praying that's not what is happening.

So when mommy is sick, what do you do? Well, you make a huge Geotrax train in the living room of course!

I have a bunch of stuff I've been getting ready for a show this weekend along with getting all of the usual Halloween stuff done.

Thankfully we managed to at least get our pumpkins carved. Cause not a whole lot else got done! Whew.

Addie kept trying to put the seeds back in her pumpkin :)

Vampire, werewolf, spooky eyes, Frankenstein

I need to get better pics tomorrow night...

Addie is absolutely cracking me up every single day. She has gotten so into Halloween and I just can't wait until we start pulling out the Christmas stuff. Everytime we see decorations in the stores she gets so excited.

It's gonna be a great Christmas :)

We have a new pet in the Whitlow house...

Such a cutie :) Her name is 'Rhino' (from the movie 'Bolt'). My son didn't care that it was a girl.

Speaking of pets, I've had to make a pretty hard decision about our older dog (not the one in the pic above). I say 'older', she's 6. I don't really want to go into details but after having a long chat with the vet today we both agreed what is best. I've never had to put down a pet that was this young and even though it's the right decision I'm still feeling quite a bit of guilt over it.

I've been working on several furniture pieces along with some other fun things for the show this weekend so I'm hoping to share those tomorrow or Thursday. Tomorrow is a crazy day with it being Halloween so we'll see how much I can get done!