Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

A Little Gold Leaf Goes A Long Way. . .

A Little Gold Leaf Goes A Long Way. . .

One last Halloween costume post. I forgot to include one of my favorite parts of the costume!
Gold leaf. is. amazing.
I had some left over from a craft project and decided that any good Greek wino needs gold skin lol.
I used moisturizer as "glue" just a dab and then place the leaf on top.
I will say I AM NOT A DOCTOR and do not know if that was the safest thing to do lol.
I did some Google searching and decided it was safe enough for me.
I did not die. I did not have an allergic reaction. Which is actually surprising because I have sensitive skin.
Anyway I think it was pretty simple but added a lot tot he costume. Check it out! (at your own risk :)

A Greek Goddess Headpiece DIY

A Greek Goddess Headpiece DIY

Ok, so this is not actually meant to be a Greek Goddess headpiece. lol
I am supposed to be a Maenad, a mythological character, follower of the Greek wine god Dionysus.
But that's a long explanation, and pretty similar.

I made this headpiece. Yay for DIY!

Rough instructions are as follows:

I bought a round "rope" of ivy @ Michael's. It is wired so you can twist & turn it as you please.

I folded the long "rope" in two & twisted it together to make the leaves appear thicker. It's also pretty long so this way you can use the whole length.

I now had a shorter rope which I curled into the shape of a crown and twisted together to make it stick. When I say twisted it sounds kind of vague but thats basically what I did, because like I said it has floral wire in it so you don't really need glue or anything.

Now that I had my crown, I used the acrylic grapes I bought at Michaels. They had ones that looked more like real grapes, but I liked these because they caught the light better ad looked more exciting. Luckily these bad boys came with wire in them as well! So I wove them into the crown of ivy and used the wires in their leaves to attach them to the crown. I also used additional floral wire I had on hand & tied it around the grapes/crown to further secure them.

Finally I added in some gold glittery leaves I bought at Michael's. Now, I could have tried to tie these in with wire, but because I wanted to use individual leaves which would be hard to tie wire around, I chose to hot glue them in. I just dabbed hot glue on the bottom of the leaf base & pressed it against the grapes. I figured they would hold glue best.

That's it! Very easy and probably only about $10 total to make. I just wore a wine colored dress my mom gave me, which looked a little too 90's to wear normally, but worked perfectly for this costume!

Sweet Bubbly Halloween Costume

Sweet Bubbly Halloween Costume

So I am a Halloween zealot. I can use zealot appropriately because Halloween did used to be a religious holiday of sorts. Now it's a celebration of gorging on candy corn, drinking in excess and putting together a ridiculous (or ridiculously slutty) costume!

I am a devout follower of these practices.

Anyway my friend asked me if I would be doing a post on creative Halloween costumes and I said no yes of course! So I thought I would share my costume from last year, which I really liked and was completely homemade.

Last year I was a champagne bottle! The pictures above are the hair aspect of the costume.
I went to Michaels & bought champagne colored Christmas ornaments (bulbs)
They were very convenient because they came with little hookish wire on them that I just bent and bobby pinned into my hair.

The other thing you are seeing is clear marbles, which I hot glued in layers onto a hairclip to make it look like piles of bubbles. Warning, they look cool but were pretty heavy. I did manage to wear them all day though.
For the rest of my costume (which sadly I have no pictures of) I wore a black tank top & black pencil skirt to be the actual "bottle" I then bought metallic gold poster board from Michaels and glued an enlarged copy of a real champagne label on to.

It was relatively easy and really interesting. I just added a ton of gold glittery make-up and ta-da! Human champagne bottle.

This year I'm going to be a Maenad (crazed female follower of the wine god Dionysus), basically a Greek wino. I've made my head piece already and will post it soon.

If I have any advice about Halloween costumes it would be:
1. Do it yourself! The store bought costumes are normally very poor quality and very widely sold.  Or if you do buy a premade costume, spruce it up with personal accessories to make it look less cookie-cutter.

2. Go to a craft store! They sell anything and everything basically. Want to be Mother Nature? Go buy tons of fabric flowers & leaves (they even sell little fake birds & butterflies) Want to be a champagne bottle. . .well you know.

3. Focus on hair & make up. Most outfits for women will be similar for costumes. Lots of dresses, skirts, etc etc. The way to really create an effect on a more plain outfit is to do really elaborate hair or make up. If you want to be a lizard (I know, who would want to do that) you can just wear a green top & pants, but do really detailed scales on your face with make up.

Champagne Wishes and Candied Apple Dreams

Champagne Wishes and Candied Apple Dreams

So please disregard my previous oh-so-cynical post.  We got the place!!! Hardwood floors, fireplace, ten foot ceilings and Victorian charm. Thus my lack of posts.  I've been super busy moving and reveling in the awesomeness of my new place.  But great craftiness has still been happening in my life and thus some post dated blog posts are badly needed!

Halloween this year was pretty hectic, since it was the day of the big move.  Also, I committed to making some deliciousness for my company's Halloween party in addition to putting my home made champagne bottle costume together.  It was a rough few days.  The outcome has been fantastic though. Everyone loved my pumpkin chocolate chip cookies the second time around ( I was specifically asked to make them again for the party, yay!) and were very impressed with these beautiful candied apples I made.  People couldn't tell if they were real or not and were very tentative in eating them. Finally after being assured they were indeed edible those who ate them raved that they were delicious.  While they didn't turn out like my inspiration apples (check out mattbites.com) I was able to salvage them and turn them into something really cool and creepy looking.

The process actually wasn't that hard, mostly sugar and corn syrup heated to the correct temperature.  Halloween turned out pretty great too, I wore my champagne costume to work on Friday and headed out Saturday night as a little wicked witch, accompanied by my sexy date Mr. Pink. . .