Quick Knitted Pumpkins Patterns

Hello! So last month I listed my Autumn Wishlist and mentioned that I wanted to knit some pumpkins. I had a look around online and picked a few different patterns to try out.

 

 

 

The first pumpkin I tried was this mini one using DK yarn. It’s from Curly Purly and I liked it but I should have maybe stuffed it more as I’d have liked it to look more defined.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next up I did this yellow pumpkin using some chunky wool (left over from a Gryffindor scarf I made for Sharon from Behind Green Eyes). I used the Autumn Pumpkins pattern from Jan Lewis on Ravelry. I liked this one, especially because I could use my circular needles with the chunky wool.

 

 

 

Next I knit this big chunky pumpkin, which is probably my favourite because it’s such a chunkster! I used some super chunk yarn that Sarah from Cashmere and Clouds gave me (and that I used before to make a pumpkin hat for my baby cousin). I used the Great Pumpkin by Rebecca Fox pattern found on Ravelry.

 

 

 

Finally I did this small white one using DK yarn, using no particular pattern, incorporating a few of the elements from above. I liked how it gave a bit of brightness and colour!

 

 

 

I meant to knit one or two more but haven’t gotten around to it. Though I might over this weekend, they are pretty fast to knit up, especially if you use chunky yarn. You could definitely get a a few done before Halloween! These are great to bust out for autumn season and if you celebrate Thanksgiving you can keep them around the place after Halloween for that. They’re quite addictive to knit, I’ll have a massive pile of them for next year!

Pumpkin Nails- One Design, Three Ways

Hello! So I’ve done pumpkin nails before but I had it in my head to do pumpkin nails similiar to the strawberry and pineapple nails I did in my Tutti Fruity look. The three ways are with a shiny top coat, with a matte top coat and as an accent nail.

 

Shiny Top Coat

 

Matte Top Coat

 

Accent Nail

To do the nails, I used a small dotting tool. For each pumpkin I did two dots slightly overlapping to try and make the pumpkin shape. I then used a small brush to paint on the yellow for definition and to add stems in green. After I had done the nails with a shiny top coat I wanted to see what it was like matte, which I liked so much more! My favourite is probably the accent nail though, I loved the shiny orange polish on the other nails.

Polishes Used

White- Model’s Own Hyper Gel in White Light

Orange-Catrice Ultimate Nail Lacquer in MAN, GO Tango

Yellow- NYC Quick Dry Nail Polish in Lexington Yellow

Green- Wet N Wild Spoiled in Permission To Proceed (ES040)

Shiny Orange- Rimmel Cocktail Colour in a Flash in Shirley Temple

Shiny Top Coat- Catrice Quick Dry and High Shine Top Coat

Matte Top Coat- Wet N Wild Matte Top Coat

 

With still over a week left before Halloween I hope to have one or two more nail looks up before then. I still have loads of ideas rattling around in my head!

Halloween Treats

1st November! I would say I can’t believe it’s already November but this Michael McIntrye video sums up why I don’t want to say it. I didn’t get up to much yesterday for Halloween, I made some treats for my younger siblings, so I thought I’d show some of them here!

Eyeball Monster Cookies

I got the inspiration from this yoyomax12 video but used the recipe in this Todd’s Kitchen video. I made the dough, baked the cookies and once they were out of the oven, I pressed white chocolate buttons into them. Because the cookies are still warm, the white chocolate will melt but if you leave them for a few hours, the chocolate will set as the cookie cools. I used a red food marker to draw on the eyes, except for the one in the second picture, I used a tube of red gel food dye just see how it would turn out. I think using icing would work just as well for the details.

Rotten Egg Cookies

Same cookie dough as above, but instead I used mini Cadbury’s Screme Eggs (Creme Eggs but with a green inside).

Chocolate Orange Hidden Bat Cake

 

So this was a bit hit and miss. I made an orange yoghurt cake in the small bread tin. Once it had cooled, I cut it into slices and used a cookie cooker to cut out bat shapes out of the cake. I then made a second yoghurt cake, this time chocolate with some black food dye added to make it darker. I spoon a small, even layer along the bottom of the same bread tin, placed the bat shaped cake slices on top of the batter and then spooned the remaining batter on top and  baked. For the orange icing, I made a cream cheese frosting with the zest of an orange and the juice of half an orange and dyed it orange. I dripped it over the bake and topped with some chocolate sprinkles. When I cut in, I saw the bat had kinda worked. I think you need something that’s either straight or rounded along the bottom, the fact that it was zigzagged and uneven probably made it harder to balance.

Jelly Brains in Jars

I got the idea for this from this mycupcakeaddiction video. I had the brain ice cube tray from last year (used them for cake pops). I liked how they turned out but my mother wasn’t very impressed!

And that was it for this year! I always lovely trying out new ideas for Halloween. I got a skull cake pan from Aldi and was going try a really colours Sugar Skull cake but never got around to it. Always next year!

Halloween Pumpkin Nails

Happy Halloween everyone! I decided to go for a simple but fun Jack-O-Lantern nail look for the day.

Unfortunately the first guy got a bit smudged but I’m going to pretend that it was meant to be like that!

Orange nail colour- Maybelline Color Show in Solar Fare

Black- Barry M Nail Art Pen

Top Coat- Catrice Gel Top Coat

Hope you all have a great night!

Easy Halloween Face Painting Ideas

I love Halloween! Though at the moment, I have nothing planned this year. And I know I’m probably not alone. So I’ve decided to do a post featuring 2 easy face painting looks I did last year. If I need to put together a costume for this year, I’ll probably either try one of these again or another face painting idea (either a skeleton or pop art girl).

Sugar Skull

 

This is a very easy look to do. Apply white face paint, then using either a paint brush and black face paint or an old eyeliner (I used liquid) to sketch in the details. It’s up to you what colours you use, I used a lipstick for the red, though you could use face paint or eye shadow. Search Google Images, YouTube and Pinterest for ideas and inspiration.

Creepy Doll

 

 

I based this look off Siobhan’s creepy doll on Letzmakeup on YouTube (video here). I did it on my sister the Halloween 2011 and liked it so much that I decided to try it on myself last year. It’s a simple enough look. Again, white face paint. I then blocked out my eyebrows so I could draw in a new set. I used the liquid eyeliner.I only put on the look for hanging around my house Halloween (when waiting to see if I got any trick or treaters. I got one call, my brother!). If I had done this properly, I would have definitely applied false eyelashes, both above and below. I think they really do add to the look. I might also had some false freckles.

If you are looking for some more easy face ideas, Marian over at High Life of Mars has loads of really cool ones that are well worth looking up!

If you are looking for some more Halloween ideas on this blog, here are some links!

My Halloween Party Food and Decorations Ideas

Halloween Nail Tutorial

Sugar Skull Nails

Halloween Treats

Witches Fingers cookies

Hopefully I’ll have one or two more Halloweeny posts up in the next day or two!

All Hallow’s Read

I don’t know how I actually came across this video, but considering I like to read, love browsing GoodReads, watch various booktubers and follow some bookish accounts on Twitter, it’s not surprising that I did. In this video, author Neil Gaiman wants to start a new tradition around Halloween called All Hallow’s Read. He wants people to give or lend scary books to people for Halloween, be it buying the books new, from 2nd hand shops, gifting on Kindles, lending books or having them being borrowed from libraries. The idea is to get people reading age appropriate scary books around Halloween and hopefully it’ll become a tradition.

Being a big time reader and lover of Halloween, OF COURSE I love this idea! I’m going to try and give some suggestions now, though not being a big horror or thriller reader, some of these are based on hearing what friends have said about books.

 Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Decided I should start with a book by the man himself. Coraline is a book perfect for children around 10ish, however I still found it creepy when I read it earlier this year! And there are loads more Gaiman books that I’m sure also fit the bill, both children and adults.

 

 

 

 Goosebumps series by R.L.Stine

I was never a massive fan of these growing up but my friends and siblings loved them and my teacher friend’s students read them now, so they are obviously still relevant! There’s also Point Horror too, the more teenage version of Goosebumps.

 Stephen King novels

I’ve only ever read one, Dolores Claiborne, which I really liked but it definitely falls more under thriller than horror. For horror, classic King novels like Carrie, The Shining or IT should be perfect! And I really want to read Joyland by Stephen King, which according to GoodReads is a ‘whodunit noir crime novel and a haunting ghost story set in the world of an amusement park’. Sounds fantastic!

 The Children of Men by J.D. James

Ok, I haven’t actually read this book but I’ve seen the film. And the film’s themes of a bleak, dystopian land creeped me out WAY more than a ‘typical’ horror or slasher film, so if the book has the same feeling of creepiness as the film, then this would probably give me the chills too!

 

 

 

 The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Another book I haven’t read but I’m adding this because my cousin studied it in school and found it so creepy that she was a bit scared to go see the film adaptation of it!

 

 

 

 

 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind

This follows the story of Jean-Baptise, born in 18th century French slums and his extraordinary scene of smell. This book creeped me out, Jean-Baptise gave me the heebee jeebees! Even thinking about it makes me shudder. I’ve seen one review call him a ‘smell vampire’, that he hunts down and must ‘own’ any scent he likes, regardless of the consequences, and this of course builds up to him having to have the scent of one young, beautiful virgin that drives him to distraction. A very unique book, I must read it again!

 

 NOS412 by Joe Hill

This book only came on my radar because 2 other friends read it and loved it. I can’t even describe the synopsis as well as GoodReads can, so check it out here. I will say the line that pops out and creeps me out the most is ‘Charles Talent Manx has a gift of his own. He likes to take children for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the vanity plate NOS4A2’. Shudder!

 

 

Classic gothic novels

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Dracula by Bram Stoker. Edgar Allen Poe. Sherlock Holmes and the Hounds of the Baskerville. As well as many more, all available for free as well on sites like Project Gutenberg.

Of course, the All Hallow’s Read website has loads more recommendations, even some by Neil Gaiman himself. And seeing as I’m not that well versed on these genres, what would you recommend yourself? Leave a comment below and let me know!

My Halloween Party

Ok, so two posts in one day about Halloween, probably should have done them earlier than this but I wasn’t feeling great. I had a Halloween party for my birthday Saturday night (I will be doing a 25 Before 25 update seeing as I am now 25!). I had a great time organizing it!

This was the bathroom. We added a red light bulb for an extra creepy feeling, added cobwebs all over the place, wrote REDRUM on the mirror and put the creepy doll complete with axe and ‘blood’ (strawberry syrup!).

Here’s Mike the Mummy! We got some white clothes, stuff with them newspaper and then wrapped him in a ripped old sheet. Luckily the sheet was off white anyway so we didn’t have to tea stain it or anything. Got the idea from this video. We also added a red light bulb to that half of the kitchen.

I also got some warning tape from Tesco that said ‘Enter if you Dare’ and put it on the front door, but never got a picture of that unfortunately.

My cupcakes! Jack Skellington and vampire puncture marks. All I did was cut the top off cupcakes to level them off, add a bit of icing to it (jam would work too), rolled out and cut out ready to use fondant, stuck on top of cupcake and then used icing pens to fill in details. Simple but effective!

Brain cake pops! I got the idea from this post here. The broken ones happened because the chocolate wasn’t thick enough, I suggest doing a double layer of white chocolate at the beginning to make it stronger.

Brain hemmorrhage shots! Inspired by this post. But instead we used pear schnapps.

These weren’t made, my boyfriend bought them for me, but they’re too cute not to add!

I also had a jelly brain made from a big jelly mould I got from 2 Euro shop, Jelly shots and Jelly Shots in the shape of pumpkins and skulls that I made in a silicone ice cube tray.

We played snap apple and also I made a pinata in the shape of a Mummys Head but didn’t get a good shot of that.

 

And you can see my costume here, I was Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games.

We had a great night, I really enjoyed it. If you are looking for other Halloween treat ideas, check out my post on Witches Fingers and last year’s post about random Halloween treats I made. Enjoy!

Halloween Nails!

I LOVE Halloween!! LOVE IT! Favourite time of the year. It’s unfortunate that this year I am sick on Halloween. I did celebrate and dress up at the weekend but it’s not the same. So to cheer myself up I did my nails!

From left to right: blood splatter, Frankenstein’s Monster, orange with black crackle, eyeball

And on that thumb

Glittery Spiders web!

Right hand

Left to right: Jack Skellington, Vampire, Mummy, Orange with glitter and on the thumb a pumpkin

I enjoyed drawing the character and I thought the orange black crackle and the orange with glitter were a nice way to be Halloweeny without the characters.

Hope you enjoy Halloween!

Halloween Treats!

I know this is a bit late but here’s all the treats I made on Halloween for my family! I might edit it later and put in recipes, but for now just pictures.

Chocolate orange cake made in a pumpkin mould I got in Aldi! Next time I use it, I’ll probably ice the cake too.

Ghost muffins! Or as we called them Ghost Toast! Made from another mould I got in Aldi.

 

Mummys (Just home made sausage rolls, using puff pastry wound in strips to look like a mummy). Not the prettiest of foods I’ll admit!

Witches brew soup! (Pea, broccoli and bacon soup). Was surprisingly yummy!

Fudgy popcorn balls. Which I ate, a miracle considering I don’ like popcorn!

Skull and pumpkin white chocolates (pumpkins just have some food colouring in them). And the dark ones are made from left over fudge sauce from the popcorn. Another mould I got from Aldi (wish I bought them all now!).

Orange jelly with gummy worms and skulls inside. Made using the mould from the pumpkin cake above. I’m particularly happy with how this looks, my mother said it looked horrible (I took that as a compliment).

Of course, there was lots of sweets from trick or treating (with the odd bit of fruit too!).

Bonus cat picture!

Woody trying to steal some of the ribs from dinner (he got into the Halloween mood by getting out his creepy eyes!).