Motivated Monday – Holiday Decorations Organizer *Free Download

Halloween will come and go in no time, so now is the time to start organizing your decorations. I recommend taking photos of all of your decoration displays. For my Halloween decorations I have: 1. My Mantle, 2. My buffet, 3. entry, 4. front porch. I’ll take photos of each of the areas, print and attach them to this form. Then I’ll fill out each of the form areas with the contents and the changes I want to make for next year. This way when I pull out all my decorations for next year, I know exactly how it looked the year before and the additional items I need to purchase or make to complete the look!  You can put this form in your holiday binder or keep it in your holiday storage bins.

(click on the image below to begin the PDF download)Click on the form images above to download a PDF version of my printable holiday decoration organizer. The downloadable PDFs in this article (and across my entire site) are free for personal use only. If you would like to blog about this free download, please accompany and images from my site with a credit and link back to this article. As a courtesy please do not link directly to a downloadable file but rather to this page. At this time, no customizations of this or any of my forms are available. Forms are a free download AS IS.

Simple Candy Bar Wrappers

Hey everyone! As we all know, Halloween is just around the corner! And we know that because the stores are already full of Christmas gear! I think Costco had Christmas lights out in July.

But first things first.

At my house, we give out FULL SIZED candy bars. My husband wants to be “that” house, so who am I to say no? Especially when 30 full sized bars is less than $15 at Costco.

Behold the yumminess….

In order to dress the candy bars up a little bit, I went to Jen’s awesome designs at Design House Digital. Specifically the Spooked line. Vintage Findings would work great for this too. Just depending if you want to go traditional or vintage Halloween.

I printed out a couple papers from the Spooked Collection.

I used Microsoft Publisher to do this. I simply created an 8.5×11 document and inserted the digital papers as a jpg. You could use MS Word or any version of Photoshop for this as well. I am not very well versed at digi scrapping, so I tend to choose the easiest way. I printed the documents onto white cardstock.

I cut each 8.5×11 piece in half the long way, which left them just a little bit short of the length of the candy bars. I made a quick template with each candy bar and simply wrapped and secured with adhesive!

Here are some pretty bars wrapped and ready to go home with some new costumed friends!

Have a happy Halloween everyone!

Deena

Halloween decorations part 2… Apothecary style

I’ve never really decorated for Halloween before, so that’s why I’m doing it in phases this year (see part 1 of my Halloween decorations). I’m having to design, make, and acquire everything for the first time, so it takes a lot of creative energy, planning and shopping! The main look I was going for was a more realistic feeling with a muted color palate. I also want to have a lot of small details because I find that those are the most memorable parts of decorating.

I have always loved apothecary jars and I have a small collection of them, so I knew that I wanted to create an apothecary display.  I gathered my existing jars and then purchased a few more at Home Goods (where they are super affordable). to balance out large and small. I also got some tiny jars at a local antique/consignment shop.

I was so excited when I found the antique postal scale and it’s definitely my favorite new piece. Oh and forgive my circus posters in the background… the artwork is phase 3 of decorating so I haven’t quite gotten that far yet!

These two jars sit on the mantle (the sparkly one I use for christmas with those very same sparklies).

The next step was to design my Apothecary labels. I had a lot of fun making these, and I created them with the scale and contents of my jars in mind. And since they coordinate so well with my All Hallow’s Eve digital line, I packaged them up and released them in my digital shop this week:

Once all the labels were designed, I printed them and cut them out.

Then I used my glue runner on the back of each label and stuck them on the jars:

Once all the labels were on, I had to fill up the rest of my jars. I stratigically bought items that I WOULD NOT EAT. Mostly so I won’t eat them and partly so that I can keep them for years to come and can just set up the display really quickly.

These are the fillers I used:

black licorice for the “lizard legs”

chocolate sprinkles for “bat toes”

peppercorns for “eye of newt”

white beans for “tooth of wolf”

black beans for “black locust poison”

gold tinsel glitter for “scale of dragon”

coffee water for “tincture of hemloc”

Not appetizing at all…

So that’s my halloween apothecary collection! Maybe I will add one or two jars every year and eventually have a giant collection! What kind of Halloween decorations do you collect?

The Holiday Planner – How will you use it? *Free Download

I will use my Holiday Planner to keep myself organized this Holiday season. I have big plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thanksgiving dinner will be served at our house this year. So I will be including a shopping list and menu. I will also start collecting any recipes I think I might want to use. This way I can find it all in one place and have them available when I am shopping. How will you use your planner?

Here is a Free Downloadable Shopping List + Menu from Jen Allyson for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and general Holiday that you can put in your Holiday Planner.

Click on the images below to download the PDF files.

Before I can get too excited about the menu, here at the Lake house we are starting a new project…. We need a new wall oven. This means we get to pull out the old one, demo some sheet rock and cut a new hole. After 23 years, wall ovens have changed in size. Lucky for me, Jen posted the most wonderful Project Master List and Project Notes for free download.

And when that new oven is installed, here is a fall family favorite recipe my Grandma Norma always made for us kids.

How we get spooky

Hi, I’m Candi and my main two passions (other than my family) are decorating and photography. This mean two things:

1. A LOT of my posts will be about decorating, redecorating, remodeling, etc.

2. My posts will always have LOTS of photos.

We love Halloween around these parts. Not the cutesy smiley pumpkins and friendly ghosts, it’s the FULL out scary, horror movie Halloween. It’s my husband’s favorite holiday (he dresses as Leather Face every year) and I try to play along because he is so sweet and accommodating when it comes to Christmas, my favorite, and my over the top decor. So, here is my before, everyday, normal living room (pre-kid-destruction):

And here is the after:

So, it looks like a lot. It has been collected over the course of our 10 year marriage. But, this year, Tyler brought the four large Halloween rubber maid boxes to the back porch and I was so disgusted by 3/4 of it that I dropped it off at Goodwill and headed to Michael’s. With a couple of grape vine wreaths, a role of burlap, some strands of skeletons, and a bag of spider webs, I was able to finish off my final look. Our outside is pretty spooky too, but I waited too late today to take the photos, I’ll have to add them tomorrow.

I have to let you in on a secret though, I love decorating, but I don’t like paying a lot for it (in other words: I’m cheap!!). The majority of my items were purchased at after Halloween sales and saved to display the next year. One, of my haunted houses, on the entry table, was found at Goodwill for $3!! I was so excited. My run to Michael’s was broken up into two separate purchases so I could take advantage of two 40% off coupons.

So, this is our spooky Halloween. If you have any questions about anything that I did, please just ASK!!

I’m so excited to be a contributor to Jen’s blog and look forward to my future opportunities to be crafty and creative.