All Hallows Read Posters 2020

It's been a challenging year and for a time I thought making posters for this year might not be welcomed. But Halloween never dies! Even if your class is your bedroom, please enjoy these posters for All Hallows Read. 

 
This is my tenth year making free posters for anyone to share and use to advertise All Hallows Read. Free! 

I've hosted the full sized files at dropbox. They're also at deviantart, if that's easier to download off of.

I don't put a year on any of the posters, so you can reuse any of the old ones you'd like such as:

2019 - Good Omens, Sharks, Genies, and More

2018 – Ravens, Ribcages, Pirates, and More

2017 - Typewriters, Fairies, Creepy Wallpaper, and Biohazards

2016 - Pumpkin, Skeletons, Haunted Books, and More

2015 - Trees, Haunted Globe, Bats, and More

2014 - Raven, Grave Reflection, and more

2013 - Fairy Witch, Tentacle, and others

2012 - Spiders and Bats and Mummies

2011 - Universal Monsters 

You can download the whole lot for this year from a file here right now if you'd like. I also included all of the past years in the dropbox file so you can add whatever you want whenever you'd like. Time is meaningless!

Now let's get to the new ones!

This year's theme should seem pretty obvious.

Haunted House -  "I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit."

 

Chained - "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge." 

Party Prince - "Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made."

 Raven - "To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core"

 

You can download the whole lot for this year from a file here right now if you’d like. I also included all of the past years in the dropbox file so you can add whatever you want whenever you’d like. Time is meaningless! 

Once again, they’re all free, all of ’em. So download the links, print, and decorate to your heart’s content.

 

Halloween is over

Like everything you spend months planning and orchestrating, a few hours reveling in and then tearing down we're going through a bit of mourning for the loss of Halloween.

But oh how grand a night it was. We'd been watching the weather reports and at first there was talk of rain and cold but the water never appeared and it actually warmed up as the day wore on.

 

 My husbands goblin that he worked on this year

 And this is my Edgar Poe Tombstone all light up and eerie

My Dragon head with glowing nostrils and a burn victim. One kid said we were burning people back there. Not us, just the dragon.

My giants head, he never did make it onto a pike. Some things always fall by the way side.

 

This was some last minute brilliance on my part. I remembered that hey we have legs and a trash can right in the way. so ta da.

;

Our mage was a bit slow in casting that spell and the Dragon got her.

It's almost tradition now to have a guy enjoying a bath in a bubbling cauldron somewhere in our haunt

This is my grave buster, he's not doing such a great job at it. There was a small girl, not much older than 3 walk past and rub his head. It was so cute.

If those pictures aren't enough to whet your appetite, here is a video of the whole thing in various staged of darkness:

Happy Halloween! See you all next year, mwHAHAHAHAha ha ha *cough*

Body Soap

Hi everyone, if you're a bit curious why it's been a little light around here every year the University shuts down for the week between Christmas and New Years so my husband is home and we're getting up to wild and crazy things.

Or we were planning on it right up until God thought the world would look a lot better buried under two feet of snow (you should see the pile from the Walmart parking lot though, I think we finally got some mountains in Nebraska).

Now that we've tried to take over Christmas and failed miserably we're back to planning next years Halloween.

There has been making jars for specimens (which are a few days from being complete so I'll show later, I promise) and ordering of lab coats (you can get anything off Amazon). Eventually we want to make some scary heads for static props (one a Dwarf, the other a science experiment gone wrong).

But in the mean time I've stumbled across a Halloween project my husband and I can work on together that's also entertaining year round.

You may remember back in October my husband had a crazy idea to make chocolate body parts. He got as far as sculpting the Liver and the Brain to make molds and then got derailed because cornstarch couldn't hold the details.
A google search and online purchase later and I found some amazing silicone putty that will create molds of whatever you want in less than a half hour.

And while reading through the list of just what all you can use this stuff for an idea popped into my head, what if for Halloween I make a little coffin shaped soap dish and put a bunch of organ and other body shaped good smelling soaps in it.

A soap making kit purchase later and here's the first test run of the four body parts we currently have.
There will be a lot more playing, a lot more figuring out colors and I was told of an awesome website for really cool fragrances so each body part can smell like something different.

The test runs actually smell pretty good right now but I've got wild/crazy ideas.

What do you think of mine and my hubbys body parts soap? You kinda have to get more into the Halloweeney mood, but it sure is fun.

Picture a Day - Day 335

While starting out on Saturday to take care of some boring weekend errands I remarked to my husband that this would be our first real Halloween on the other side of the fence.

Instead of us as the wee tots wearing the care bare or ghost costume staring doe eyed at the sugar in front of us, we were the possibly weird adults sitting inside the house handing out tummy aches by the bagful.

At first I wasn't sure how it'd all go, but once those little spooks and ghouls showed up we slipped right into showtime.

Under a bright full moon our yard came to life:Actually it more came to death, but you get the general idea.
While we got lots of oohs and aahs and even one woman who had her picture taken with my husband's demon there was one little boy that really brought home just how cool our decorations were.

He trotted up the walk accompanied by brothers/sisters/friends as well as mom and dad dressed up like Mickey Mouse. He couldn't have been more than 4 and while his friends and siblings all crowded around the box full of candy I was holding, with bright eyes he zipped past me for the luminaries and pointed in excited glee "Those are so cool!"

Then he was deep in the yard, checking out the tombstones, the pumpkins and the flashing demon babbling as only a four year old can as he tried to ask both what it was and tell us just how awesome he thought it all was.

It took his parents dragging him to the candy bowl and picking a piece so they could move on to get him out of the fun.

If that doesn't scream future Halloween nut, nothing will.
I should back up a bit too. While I tried to photograph everything that our yard was going to look like and get a good post in on Saturday, well we had a few last minute additions.

The first was this female Victorian ghoul. I'd had my eye on her all season but she was way too pricey at $40. Wandering around picking up some last minute necessities (like toilet paper) I saw her again and she was priced down to only $16 on Halloween day.
Tucked in the sits bath is a skeleton enjoying a nice soak in the ever changing mister/water jets of a cauldron. It was all my husbands idea.
And if you're curious as to just why everything was so misty in the pictures, after realizing that the suckers never go on sale we finally broke down and just before 5 bought ourselves a fogger.
But even these pictures don't really convey the Halloween essence our house took on this first year, so I took and created a little video of the yard at three different stages at night:The hat has been thrown into the ring, the gauntlet has slapped a knight in the face, the challenge begun. I fear we are already the cool Halloween house on the block but how much harder will we have to work next year to maintain the title?

I'll give you a hint. My husband and I are thinking of setting up an evil laboratory in our garage next year. So we'll have a haunted yard and a haunted garage.

I hope everyone else had a great Halloween, saw lots of trick or treaters (if you wanted to) or had a fun time playing old party games and dressing up.

Picture a Day - Day 333

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE!

And Happy Halloween Wedding to everyone getting married today. May it all go as swimmingly spooktacular as you'd hoped.

Last night while my husband held onto the puppy as she tried to be oh so helpful by getting in the way and chewing on sticks, I set up our front yard for, what else, HALLOWEEN.

This is our front stoop/porch/whatever you call a handful of steps. I carved the tree while my husband carved the zombie pumpkin on the left (the death pumpkin is a fake one from last year).

The luminaries are actually party bags we found last year on our honeymoon (sadly at least 75% of the stuff we bought on our honeymoon was for Halloween because we're just that dorky).
For $2 we got 20 of these cool bags. I just added some rocks and tossed in an electric tea light to help light the way for trick or treaters.
Even our wedding pumpkin from last year makes an appearance in the foliage on the steps.
Waiting patiently to claim his next victim sits death next to a rusty old lantern. Or maybe he's just hoping someone will trade with him. He's stuck with a lousy bag full of mostly rotten apples and candy corn and he'd really like to get rid of the candy corn.
The yard is mostly made up of our craft projects. My tombstone is the first to great people while one we got at Target on sale to help fill out the recently dug cemetery sits more towards the back.
My husbands demon, complete with horns and rusted sword through the ribs sits more towards the forgiving back, but we're going to put a flashing red strobe light on him to call people's attention to it.

And if you also look carefully, you'll see a little spook poking through the window. It's actually my cheesecloth ghost with a candle on a timer inside him.
I spotted this guy at Walgreens and thought "Now this is what a vampire should look like, more monster than teen heart throb." The hard part was getting him into the tree as our tree apparently doesn't like to have low hanging branches, so with the help of a step stool, a reaching stick (which we found on the ground) and a lot of praying up went Mr. Vampire.
I hope you have a ghoulishly good evening. And remember, it's Halloween so there's a good chance the man in black robes carrying a scythe is more likely to be after the punch bowl instead of your soul.
But, then again . . .

MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

Picture a Day - Day 332

Well, this is it. Today is my last day at work. I guess I'll spend most of the day packing up all the random stuff I've accumulated here, clean up a bit, and bid a tearful goodbye.

Yesterday my labmate, boss and a few other people in the department took me out to Olive Garden where I proceeded to eat way more Italian food than one person should ever suffer (I am not a huge meal eater, I'd be a lot happier being free to graze throughout the day. As you can imagine Thanksgiving isn't anything all that special to me).They also got me a card with a cute puppy on it, a gift certificate to Michaels (which I'll be amazed if it lasts a week. If there's one gift certificate I'm sure to use it's one to a craft store) and my labmate knitted me a few pot holders.

Stiff upper lip and all that, but it kinda feels like one of those relationships where everything seemed perfect, everyone got along great and the mesh was good. But the timing was off, so we have to go our separate ways.

But I've been wading in depression enough this week. Time for something a little fun.

I've been working at home on sketching out skeletons. Some because I want to work and understand more the human body and various poses and some because, dude, skeletons are awesome.

My first was just a straight on coming at you skeleton. I think he just looks cute as hell for some reason.I had a hell of a fight with the ribs and my hatred of fingers and toes goes without saying, but I liked the way he turned out for the most part.

Now onto something a bit more of a challenge. Let's try a skeleton that's moving around a bit. He's sort of a play on Baron Saturday with his top hat dancing to a beat.
Or possibly someone trying to ice skate missing the all important skate part and about to fall on his bony rear end.

Because no one should ever go without for Halloween, if anyone is still hunting for an avatar for the spooks and goblins this Saturday I made a couple from my skeletons free to share.

It isn't anything too fancy, but I like the clear lines and the simple black and white. Makes it seem a bit more fancy than I could ever really be.

They're both in the 150 px and smaller range, so it should hopefully fit in most places.

Feel free to take one or both and use them all you'd like. I'll just call it my Halloween treat to the masses and write it off on my taxes. How much do you think a black and white av is worth? Two cents? Maybe a Nickel.

Happy Halloween everyone. Tomorrow I'll have tons of pictures of our home haunt if anyone's curious just what we did to our front lawn.

Til then, it's never Halloween (or day before Halloween) til I hear this song at least once.I did the Mash, the Potato Mash. It was a culinary smash.

Happy Halloween!

Picture a Day - Day 328

Some days I put down the candid camera and pick up the more "okay now stand like this and close one eye while jumping in the air" camera (which are actually the same camera I was just using one of those mete-fours.)

I want cute pictures of Essie as she comes to experience each holiday while still maintaining that puppy enthusiasm to please us as much as possible before the jaded "I hate you so much and can't believe your making me do this looks start to show up." So this weekend I picked up the pumpkin our realtor gave us, my camera and trundled Es out to the backyard.

At first I was a bit worried I couldn't get her to calm down enough to sit anywhere near the pumpkin.

Luckily for our little semi-vegetarian that was not an issue.
Mm, pumpkin stems. Just as tasty as the weeds I pull out of the garden when no one is looking.

After a bit I tried to get her attention away from the chewing and biting so maybe I could get a picture of her face.
What do you want mom?

Oh fairy godmother can you turn my pumpkin into an even bigger pumpkin so I can eat it?
After getting the pumpkin pictures down it was now onto tackle an even more extreme photoshoot, a black lab puppy in a costume.

As Essie is named after a literary witch it seemed rather fitting that she go as one this year.
We had about 5 seconds before the hat was pulled, twisted off and lying on the ground while the puppy licked our faces. It's quite amazing just how flexible a lab puppy really is. She could put some octopi to shame for the tiny places and weird body distortions she can pull off.

Realizing the hat was a no go, I thought I'd try the little cape that came with it instead.
The wind was cooperating quite nicely as the cape billowed around her giving quite a dramatic effect for a puppy hoping that she'll get the milkbone the photographer is holding off camera.

Okay, so we got a pumpkin picture. We managed a hat one. And there's even a billowing cape one. But can we bring it all together?
Er . . . well if you've ever wondered what a witch looks like when she's chasing her tail that should give you an idea.

Once more, with feeling and half a box of milk bones.
SUCCESS! A Halloween picture worthy of a few avatars at least.

"Okay, I'm done playing dress up now. Time to play and wrestle, right?"
I'm not sure what we'll do with the costume for actual Halloween, maybe skip the hat and just put the cloak on her (she didn't mind that part at all).

Anyone with pets, do you have a costume all picked out for your little ones or are they going to go naked for the festivities?

The nice thing about taking silly pictures of a dog when they're little, when she's older she'll only feel ashamed of them if she eats them and gets caught.

Picture a Day - Day 327

There's just one more weekend til Halloween!

AAAAHHHHH!!

Okay so it isn't quite as bad as that but my husband and I have accepted that some of the great cool totally wicked ideas we had are just not going to be fully finished the first Halloween in our house.

Not as many fun lights, not as many props, no giant pumpkin bag full of leaves.

But that doesn't mean we can't at least get some of them to almost doneish. Like my fairy specimen.

I wanted to create the feel of an old museum where exotic butterflies are pinned inside dusty old wooden cases. So a little paint, a little tea staining and a lot of swearing as I couldn't get the backing back into the shadow box and I created my Fairy Specimen perfect for any crypto-zoological museum.
This fairy only fills half the box as I want to do another more typical fairy aka big head and two sets of wings, but again time is slipping by quickly and there are other more pressing projects.
For a closer view of the fairy specimen tag. I worked a few sort of puns/inside jokes in there.
And while I was working hard and swearing a lot at my fallen angel fairy to get it some hair and into the cursed box my husband has embarked on an interesting endeavour of his own.
He's going to make fancy chocolates molded to look like various body parts. So far he's just created clay models of the brain and lung (which look really cool) but he's got wild plans for many other various organs.

There's still pumpkins to carve and puppies to take adorable pictures of in her costume and then this Friday we finally put it all together outside and have our first ever yard haunt.

Picture a Day - Day 323

October is Squash Alertness Month.

A small band of neighbors come together to police all the extra squash and gourd paraphernalia that grace the stoops of homes dotting the landscape from roaming bands of teenagers with one idea in mind: killing every pumpkin they meet.

No one knows what pushes your average vandal to commit Jack'o'cide but short of getting an actual haunted pumpkin to scare them straight your only hope is the Squash Squad.

So imagine my total surprise to find this bright orange pumpkin tucked on our steps. It goes against all the laws of Halloween to have someone give you a pumpkin as opposed to stealing yours especially in broad daylight.

Closer inspection revealed the answer.
Okay aside from the photoshopping a man into a monkey suit trick (which reminds me of an old Simpson episode where Bart goes to start a savings account and stops at the teller who's wearing an ape mask. "A professional in an ape costume is still a professional.") I guess it's a nice thought.

But now I'm starting to wonder just how long will these random little presents last? Will we find an orphaned tree in our front yard mid December? An Abe Lincoln Top hat for presidents day? A horde of veg eating rabbits unleashed for Easter?

How long do Realtors keep reminding you that they helped you find your house?

I've been working feverishly on a little something at home that while it isn't quite done I couldn't wait to share a little preview.

It still needs hair (which I'm going to steal from a $1 barbie I think, it's like hair plugs really) and a shadow box to stick it in but this is my own little faerie.
When it's finished you'll get to see all the pictures and a better idea of just how tiny this thing is. But for now, I have a mummified faerie in my kitchen.

Has anyone seen some decimated pumpkins yet? I caught one smashed to hell on a walk through the park with Es (which was lots of fun as I did my best to keep her from eating any of it). Have you ever had your pumpkins smashed to smithereens?