Happy Holidays

I know that I've been out of touch lately, but I'm sure that you all can understand with the holidays in full swing.

I'll be back to my regular posting again soon.

Till then, I wanted to wish you all a safe and happy holiday season.

I'm looking forward to a New Year filled with blogging fun  =)

On the 16th Day of Creepmas...

Abita invited Edgar & Milton over for some holiday frightivities.  Milton is still a little confused about Creepmas...

but hey, it's the thought that counts ;)

On the 11th Day of Creepmas...

...Abita found a lovely black snowflake hanging on his Creepmas pumpkin =)  

He must have been an awfully frightful skelly this year!

On the 8th Day of Christmas...

Abita got his very own pumpkin ;)

Never was there a happier Skelly!


Merry Creepmas!!!

There's No Place Like Transylvania For the Holidays???

Driving into work this morning, I realized just how subconsiously my mind is always geared toward Halloweenish things.

I was singing along, loudly,  to the classic Christmas song,  (There's No Place Like) Home For the Holidays.

After the initial, "Oh there's no place like home for the holidays" chorus, the first line of the next stanza is, "I met a man who lives in Tennessee, and he was headin’ for, Pennsylvania and some homemade pumpkin pie;".   Well, apparently, in my mind he wasn't headin' for Pennsylvania because I blurted out "TRANSYLVANIA"... I had a really, really good laugh imagining Count Dracula going home to his snowy covered castle for some pumpkin pie ;)

Merry Creepmas!

There's a lot of fun going on in the Halloween Blogging community right now with the celebration of Creepmas.  Creepmas is the Halloween community's answer to retail's early push of Christmas EVERYTHING which begins in July and eventually overshadows our season's holiday by the time October arrives.


Bloggers who volunteer, write about Halloween/Christmas collisions for the first 13 days of December.


To see all of the Creepmas bloggers, go here: Creepmas 2011


I'm unofficially celebrating Creepmas.  I'll be sporadically posting Halloweenish Christmas stuff through out the season :)


Merry Creepmas!!!!

Rest In Peace Halloween 2011

I finally finished packing up the rest of my Halloween stuff today.  I figured it was high time since we're about to head into December. I've been excessively lazy about it this year.  It was sad seeing it all go into boxes and up into the attic, but it was also impressive seeing it all grouped together on my island ;)

Not to worry, Gairy (the cat) didn't get packed up with it ;)

Home Haunter Video Awards

I'm still pretty new to most of the cyber haunting communities, forums and blogs.  For the past 4 years that I've been intensely haunting, I've been trying to absorb everything that there is to know about haunting.  At this point, I know what FCG's, TOT's, fog chillers and monster mud are.  I have the perfect recipe for paper mache and I'm really handy with an Xacto knife and a couple of sheets of foam. 

But, there are things that I am still learning about everyday and the Home Haunter's Video Awards is one of those things that really caught my eye this year. 

 Every year, I would catch a snippet of something about Home Haunter's Video Awards, whether is was a video submission deadline announcement or video release or the awards announcement, but it was all really back round noise to everything else that I was getting into.  This year, that changed ;)

As a huge fan of The Davis Graveyard (www.strangelittlegirl.blogspot.com), I was thrilled to learn that they have an Etsy shop where they sell some of their really awesome graveyard creations.  That is where I really took notice of the 2010 Home Haunter's Video Awards DVD collection, which they had up for purchase in their shop. What an opportunity to be able to see a huge sampling of what everyone out there is doing!  Not to mention the perfect thing to watch in October.  So, I couldn't help but buy it :)

Watching this collection of haunts, haunted houses and haunter's projects was like trick r' treating around the country from my sofa.  It was amazing to see how this passion of mine, was very much a passion of many other people out there.  It's also a great creative resource for any haunter.  I saw things on the video, that I hadn't encountered before online, like movement activated drop down panels on cemetery entrance columns.


The competition part of it is intriguing too.  The videos are viewed by a panel of judges who are past winners of one of the various categories of the Home Haunter's Video Awards.  The categories include: 
Best Yard Haunt, Best Indoor/walk through Haunt, Best Static Prop, Best Animated Prop, Best Party House, best Video Production, Best How to and the most exciting of them all, the Propmaster Award.


The Propmaster Award is described as, an award given to recognize a person in the home haunter community that has made exceptional contributions to the home haunting community.  What a major compliment from the Haunting Community!


This year, I have decided that I'm going to give it a try and enter in the competition myself.  Knowing that I was going to enter this year, really gave me the drive to strive to be be more creative and to pay more attention to detail and to really step back from my cemetery and see it from the perspective of those who view it.  It's really been a good "exercise", so to speak for my creativity.


The deadline for submission is January 31st!  So, I had better get to work!!!


To learn more about the Home Haunters Video Awards go to: 
http://www.hauntersvideoawards.com/videos.htm

American Horror Story

I was really down in the dumps after the 31st.  We dismantled and put all of our yard haunt away on Nov. 1st.  Halloween clean up sucks.  The decoration process comes on slowly, building up more and more as the month passes, with a grand decorating rush the last few days and then BAM, it's over.  No more JOL's, no more skulls, no more tombstones, it just vanishes.

So after two people, in the same day, told me that I HAD to check out FX's new series, "American Horror Story", I gave it a look and boy, was I glad that I did! I felt like I had found my post-Halloween shoulder to lean on :)

This show is intriguing.  It has bits and pieces of classic horror movie material in it.  It's a bunch of old tales and tid-bits told in a new way, with a few modern day horror tales mixed in. 

The show takes place in modern day and based around a troubled family that has recently moved in, from another town, to get a "fresh start". Immediately, they realize that the old house that they have moved into, has a very disturbing history.  Each episode kicks off with a flash back to the demise of former tenets of the house. These clips foreshadow what kind of antics and characters the newest tenants will be encountering. 

You can see it on FX, Wednesday nights at 10PM (ET). 

I highly recommend it.  It's a nice way to cling on to our season and also a fresh way to enjoy some of our favorite creepy tales and urban legends.

To catch up on previously aired episodes, you can catch episodes 2 & 3 on demand and 4 part 1 on the FX website: http://www.fxnetwork.com/shows/originals/ahs/

Halloween 2011

Halloween 2011, a set on Flickr.

Whoa... can't believe that I figured this out :)  *Does happy dance*


Let the obnoxious picture posting begin!!!

Wheels are turning

with new ideas for next year all ready.  Last year after Halloween, my mind was completely blank.  I really had to search for new project ideas.

I'm all ready obsessed with this new one.  Sketching away ;)

More from Halloween

I finally figured out Picasa and boy do I wish I had started using it sooner!

Here are more pictures from Halloween :)  More to come!

Halloween 2011

FINALLY, a decent post from yours truly :)  Here are a couple of pictures from Halloween =)  I have many more, but I have to figure out a more efficient way of posting them.  

We worked until the sun was almost down on Halloween evening.  I will admit that not everything that we planned on having made it to the yard this year.  The projector, the ghost light ball, the peppers ghosts were all things that just didn't work out and needed more tweaking.

YET, it was an amazing Halloween.  We received some of the best compliments yet from some loyal visitors and it's compliments like those that make all of the hard work on those last few days, worth it. :)

So, without further ado, here are a couple of pics.  I'm off to figure out how to post the rest of them.

Happy Halloween 2011 to you all!!!