And we are finally off on Halloween crafting! I let myself get tempted by Christmas projects for a few weeks before I finally circled back to Halloween. I was in the mood to craft tonight and initially thought I would pick a collection and spend a couple of hours die-cutting and fussy cutting elements so that I would have a base ready to craft with later. It turned out that I die-cut a pocket and already had an idea on how to embellish it, so I let inspiration take me where it wanted to go and I quickly ended up with a completed project.
I selected the Boo Crew collection from Simple Stories. I absolutely fell in love with it when sneak peeks came out last year. It reminded me of an older Halloween paper collection from Stampin' Up! with rust and dark grey colours that I had used up until the very last bit. The imagery is also incredibly cute, so I asked my local store to pretty much order the whole collection for me. Last year being what it was with the pandemic, the elements trickled in a few elements at a time and by the time I had received most of it, I was already mostly done with my Halloween projects. The one time in my life that I worked ahead of time... I wasn't too concerned about it, I knew I would like revisiting the collection later.
My base envelope was made with the Small Crayon Box Card die set. When you forgo the crayons, you really just end up with a fun envelope that can be used for a lot of different things. I remembered my beloved Spider Web doilies (sold by Stampin' Up! many moons ago). I still have quite a few in the pack, but I'll be sad when they are all used up. I wish I had that shape as a die... I folded the doily in two on the side of the envelope and stapled it in place on both sides since the envelope was not glued together yet.
As I was pulling my doilies out from my Halloween embellishments box, I found some old die-cuts from Making Memories, so I picked a cute sparkly label shape and a sparkly eyed ghost as well. I assembled the envelope and wrapped grey with black stripes ribbon around it. I then added the label with black foam adhesive, layered a leftover piece of paper at an angle and then I remembered my skull and crossbones die from Echo Park. This is actually from the Pirate Tales collection, so the dies include a little bandana you can put on the skull to make it look like a pirate, but I realized I should keep it around for Halloween crafting. Here's the best part: purchased of $0.99 in the Clearance section. Talk about a score! I think Echo Park would sell their dies more if they included an image of the die pieces as well - the image of the assembled die on the front of the packaging does not always show clearly how many separate pieces are in the set and what can be done with pieces individually.
The skull was die-cut out of the pearlized Speciality paper from Stampin' Up!, which is definitely off-white, so it works well with this collection that has vanilla as a neutral instead of white. I added RIP from the foam stickers, as well as two of the stars, and I tucked my little ghostie peeking out from inside the envelope. As the final touch, I added a rhinestone inside the skull's eye socket. I like where I landed with that one.
I have a sneaking suspicion the kids will not be going door to door again this year for Halloween, so I think I'll put together cute candy packages and prepare another scavenger hunt to entertain the girls with again this year.
Supplies
Specialty Paper: Pearlescent (Stampin' Up!)
Patterned Papers, Foam Stickers: Boo Crew (Simple Stories)
Die-Cuts: Toil & Trouble (Making Memories)
Dies: Small Crayon Box Card (Honey Bee Stamps); Skull & Crossbones (Echo Park)
Accessories: Spiderweb Doilies, Rhinestone Basic Jewels, Mini Stapler,
Black Striped Basic Grey Satin Ribbon (Stampin' Up!); Black Foam Adhesive (Brutus Monroe)
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