Frankenbag and Layouts!

Ooooh, the scariness of it all! I just love Halloween! It's fun to dress up, to gorge on candy, and decorate the house with all kinds of do dads. That's right. Dooo dads. What is Halloween without Frankstein? ...... Frankensteinless. That's what. Okay.... I'm tired. I'm OVER tired. Can you tell?

Any-hoo, since I can't have a Frankensteinless Halloween, I made this cutie pie:
How I wish I could take credit for this idea - but like I said before, I'm a slacker and I love to steal other creative people's creativeness. Leah's blog is awesome - always full of inspiration!
Check out the fun Frankenstein bag tutorial HERE.

We had our good friends, the H family, over to dinner on Sunday so while we put the finishing touches on our WAY YUMMY turkey, we had the kiddos making those fun Frankenstein bags. Some of them made bags, while others made puppets out of their bags. My kiddos took their school lunch packed in the bags they made. The possibilities are endless - make a cyclops, or a witch, or a ghost! Fun stuff.

After dinner, and after some much needed visiting time (giving my brain a grown up work out) we commenced with our family's Halloween tradition of decorating a "gingerbread" haunted house. Okay - this is WAY more fun than decorating a Christmas gingerbread house. You can discover SO MANY fun candies to use on these things at this time of year. I have to admit, though, this wasn't a stellar showing of talent this year. We kind of just let the kids go wild on this thing and boy, did their creative juices flow!
You know, there have been years past where we really went all out. MAKING the gingerbread from scratch, cutting out the pattern, even going as far as putting bubble gum tape shingles on the darn thing. But you know, the kids have never enjoyed the decorating part of it quite as much as they did this year. Can't you tell? :) JJ has purple stained teeth from picking at this thing when she thinks I'm not looking. Who am I kidding? I've been doing it too, but we'll keep that our little secret ;)

I was also busy whipping up these little dollar-store jars for my kids' school teachers. I bought the jars at the Dollar store for $1 (were you shocked?), then I mod podged some black and white polka dotted paper on the lid. Stuck some vinyl stickers on, tied some black tulle around the rim and filled it with goodies. It was easy to whip up four of these, and I hope their teachers like them.
Before I go to bed (ooooh, I loved typing those words) I wanted to share some pages I've done just to prove I'm not a total scrap-slacker! (okay, I totally am - these pages are from one of Lisa Bearnson's kits. LOL!) I love using a lot of photos on pages, perhaps because I feel like my photos are my babies! It's hard to pick and choose which to include. Also because my memory is terrible, and I feel like photos capture my memories. I don't want to lose any! I love finding layout ideas that allow me to include several photos, but still leave a neat, clean feel to the page.





That's all, folks! Another busy week ahead. I sure hope you have a fantastic Halloween wherever you live! I'd love to see your fun creepy crafts! Leave a link in your message!