Happy Halloween!!

Image courtesy of Jack and Cat Curio

The Friendly Visitor

You know how I love shopping in thrift stores....one of my recent finds was this old book. It's an 1885 bound volume of a monthly religious magazine. It was absolutely falling apart but I loved the cover and the pages and illustrations are wonderful. I plan to make a journal out of the cover and I know the pages will find their way into a collage one day. Here are a few pages from the book...feel free to use them too. What treasures have you found lately?

So Charming!

I love charms...I love to make them and I love to trade them! I joined a charm swap with some of the members of the Altered Dominos & Other Altered Game Pieces Flickr Group recently and the charms have been flying in! Here's the charm I made...it's an old wooden Monopoly house with a lucite bead (thank you Beth!) and a little mica home charm.

And here are the lovely charms I've received. Everyone was so imaginative. Mary Ann made her own tiny clay cupcake. Jan colored a Monopoly shoe and added beautiful lavender beads and trinkets. joAnne made two charms! I love the little metal man. Cindy made the sweetest mini domino bird charm. Heather took a die and added a collaged wooden roof...too cute! Nina made a little beaded person out of an old checker and Eda made a lovely fleur de lis scrabble charm. Every one is so special!

A Little Halloween Decorating

As much as I love Halloween I don't have a lot of Halloween doo-dads that I put up each year. I think I was feeling a little down in the dumps today because Quinn is gone on a business trip for THREE WHOLE WEEKS (!) and the house was so quiet...so I decided to cheer myself up with a little Halloween decorating. I took one of my favorite doll heads and sat him in my tin of fall potpourri. I tossed a few of those little pumpkin shaped pods in there for some color, gave him a party hat and a little pint sized friend with a "Happy" sign. Then I remembered I had this pumpkin trick-or-treater stashed away from a few years back and an extra Halloween banner...I put everything on the table in the entryway under my Farmer's Market Girl. I think they all look very happy together!

Life's Better When...

Here's the circle journal page I completed for Nellie's journal. Her theme is "Life is better when..." so since we all became such fast friends at Artfest I just had to finish the sentence with "you have friends." I've loved working in a new journal each month...this is the 5th one! The background here was inspired by techniques in Taking Flight by Kelly Rae Roberts. And the Paper dolls are a free template from Somerset Studios.

Dorothy Tag Book Swap

Karla of Karla's Cottage hosted a Dorothy Tag Book Swap recently. She has a great post here on the whole process of receiving and sorting and packaging and mailing swaps...you have to go look! You'll be amazed to see all that goes into hosting a huge swap like this. My hat's off to her! Plus, you'll get to see many of the gorgeous tags she's received. I'm looking forward to seeing my book when it arrives. Here are my tags...I love this image from the original The Wizard of Oz. I used another image from the same book to make a shrink plastic charm to go along with my tag.

Blog-Along with Santa Claus and a Giveaway

Linda is hosting a Santa Blog-Along at A Swap For All Seasons and you're invited! Everyone who's participating in the current swap will be posting pictures of Santa on our blogs so we can all blog along and visit. There will even be another fabulous giveaway for those participating in the swap. But you don't have to be participating in the swap to enjoy all the fun with Santa...so post a picture if you like, stop by A Swap for All Seasons to let us know Santa has visited your blog and then grab a cup of cocoa and blog along with all of us! HOHOHO