Fun Fri-YAY

 I'm always happy when I have some craft supplies on hand even if I don't really know what I am doing with them...and, after yesterday's haul, I have a lot. And so, I awoke today looking forward to making something. 

Of course, the first thing that I did was to stain the dough bowl. I wanted to do it the easiest way possible which meant using my Waverly antique wax instead of pulling out the Minwax stain. I prefer the antique wax because it is water soluble and, in this case, it is a good thing it was!

The dough bowl has a very rough finish to it so I anticipated it slurping up the wax very quickly...and it did! Even more quickly than I had thought. And, the bowl got VERY dark...actually much more dark than even I liked. Luckily I had decided to do this in the kitchen so I was able to immediately get it under running water and I was able to knock down the darkness quite a bit. I guess I was also lucky that I was trying to stain something that could be put under water. In any case, it came out just as I wanted.

Then, of course, I had to decide where I wanted the bowl and the raven. I really think I am going to want it in the living room for Halloween and it needs to be near an electrical outlet so I decided to put it in the front entry. I will say that if I was just starting to decorate for fall, I would have put a lot more thought into this but, because the decor is already done-and probably not going to be up that much longer-I didn't have it in me to start rearranging everything.

And so, I moved the wood pumpkin that was once here and took apart the urn...and came up with this. Again, if I was just starting this there would probably be something different in the dough bowl for the raven to sit on but I used what I had.

Of course then that big blank spot drove me crazy so I found a piece of an old spindle out in the garage and found a short orange candle to put on it. It is definitely not the total answer but I was good with it for today because I wanted to get going on my little Halloween craft. And, the wall does look a bit more balanced.

I had seen some cute little vintage Halloween shelf sitters that people did with images they ordered from Amazon. As much as I liked their images, I just couldn't justify spending that much unless I was going to use most of the images-to just use one or two seemed silly. And so, I hit my "Halloween" file and found a cute little witch that I have used before. I printed her on cardstock and cut her out. Then, I gave her a coat of ModPodge to give her a bit of a finish and put a coat of the same on the shiny plastic cauldron to give it some "tooth" before painting it with black chalk paint. I did that for two reasons-I didn't want the shiny finish and I didn't wanted the "Happy Halloween" sentiment on the sides.

Then I backed the image with a piece of black card stock to give her more rigidity and then just started to build. I had a lot of Halloween embellishments from so many projects over the years so I just started playing. I ended up putting some floral foam in the cauldron and gluing on the tree. Then I covered the foam with some Halloween garland. I added pieces of chop stick to the girl, the pumpkin and the haunted house and inserted them into the foam and then added the web and the bats-which were rings that I cut apart. It isn't exactly what I was going for but it's cute and will fill in an empty spot somewhere-if there is and empty spot somewhere. Lol

So that's it for today. I've got to clean up and then get potted plant watered before I can sit down and put my feet up. I'm not sure what the weekend holds but I'll be back soon. Until then, stay safe and stay tuned.