Fall busy body - and a giveaway

I always seem to be more productive in the fall. I don't know if it's the invigorating chilly winds or the fact that we're forced inside more often, but I'm taking advantage and churning out some new items for the shop.
I recently listed some scarves in the shop. A special thanks to my friend Jessica for being my model. She's really much cuter than any woman has a right to be.

Also I find that I'm overrun with these recycled envelopes. I make them out of the pages of the kids' Highlights magazines. The artwork is really colorful and fun and it just breaks my heart to chuck their old magazines into the recycle bin when they start piling up around the house.

So I started out making them just for my own use but when my stack reached the 10 inch mark I figured it might be time to try and spread them around a bit. I've put some up for sale and I'd like to give some away.

Smack an address label on them and you can send them via snail mail. They're also great to house handmade cards, or to hold a special note.

This set of 6 is up for the taking. Just leave a comment on this post and I'll pick a random winner on Sat. Oct. 24th. Make sure your comment includes a way for me to contact you in case you're the lucky winner.

And stay tuned. I should have even more new stuff listed hopefully by the end of this week, and some other exciting news to share.

UPDATE 10/25/09: The winner of the envelope giveaway is Iiona! Thanks!

Black Spray Paint Halloween

Things are going a little more smoothly around my place lately. My cold is gone, the laptop is back and functional (with no lost data!) and things are running so smoothly that the kids and I found some time to do some Halloween decorating.

So I whipped out the black spray paint and we went to town.

I sprayed a styrofoam egg carton black and then we cut it up and used it for the bodies of some pretty cute/scary spiders. These were lots of fun. The kids decorated them with a little paint of their own, and we added the pipe cleaner legs and of course the googly eyes. We had a lot of fun with the eyes. I think my favorite is the cyclops spider. I threaded some string through the top and we hung them around the house.


Then we located a sufficiently spooky branch from the backyard, painted it black, draped it with fake spiderwebs and stuck a couple black crows from the dollar store on it.

Granted, it might be a little spookier without the speakers behind it, but let's face it, life without surround sound would be even scarier - or at least my husband would think so.

So we were all set for Halloween and then . . . it snowed.

Thankfully it only stayed around for a couple hours.