Spooktaular Halloween magazines and books

Let start this party off with sharing some of the Halloween magazines that have hit the newsstands this season. We have mentioned in past posts about how we love to collect all the holiday issues magazines and get inspiration from and ideas for future ornament designs. And also how after reading them we will recycle the magazines by cutting the images we want and add them into a binder and boxes.



We always enjoy going to the bookstore this time of year to see all the fun Halloween images that grace the covers of our favorite magazines.



Along with magazines we try to expand our reference library with holiday themed books.
Here are a few of the ones we have. The Halloween vintage graphics book (left) is a little treat of a book full of really cool vintage graphics, old costumes and illustrations (we also have the Christmas & Valentines in the series). The Halloween Collectibles book (right) is another great reference book to see all sorts of vintage images. Author Mark Ledenbach was a guest on the Martha's tv show last week, where he showed some of his collection and and talked about his 2nd edition (this one is his first). You can check out the show here.



This image is a page from the new Bethany Lowe's Folk Art Halloween book. We came across this book a few weeks ago at a little boutique and we just had to get it. We haven't had a chance to look through it in depth, but just glancing through it the craft projects look very funny.
These are just a few Halloween books we have. And of course we also really love the Matthew Mead Halloween book which came out this year, also in magazine form.



And we mustn't forget the children's books. We must confess though, we purchased these before we had our son so our focus for these purchases were strictly visually.

Our first Halloween BLOG PARTY!

Welcome one and all to our first web blog party!! All day today we will be posting fun Halloween themed projects and fun images that we have compiled from lots of many magazines & books we have and some of our favorite Halloween decor we have collected over the years. We aim to hopefully inspire you to decorate or create some fun stuff this Halloween.
We also have extended our Halloween ornament ordering deadline until Monday the 20th in case you get inspired to decorate your home with some of our fun whimsical ornaments.


We have joined with Fanciful Twist Blog where you can visit her site and see her long list of other links to many other creative blog sites who have joined the party for some Halloween fun.

Now let the Gould times begin!!

Hurray for Apples and Pumpkins!!

With our crazy schedules and every weekend we were available to go it would rain. But this past weekend we finally managed to enjoy a beautiful crisp, fall day and go apple picking with the family. The weather was perfect and the apples were yummy. Here are few pics of the fun day of apple picking and running through the pumpkin patch. We also indulged in the delicious homemade cinnamon donuts...We spared you the shots of us eating them.
Happy Fall





Gryffin was very excited tasting the different kinds of apples, trying to decide his favorite.








They had tons of these bumpy pumpkins which they were calling "Kunckle heads"

A Halloween BLOG Party!

Mark your computer calendars for Saturday Oct 18th and let's have a Halloween Blog party!!!
Swirly Designs is taking part of this fun event hosted by at Fanciful Twist Blog. What is a blog party? you can check out Fanciful Twist blog where she can explain it much better then we can and has lost of fun photo examples, but basically a bunch of bloggers will share everything and anything Halloween related showing you great ideas and inspiration to celebrate the second most popular holiday of the year...Halloween.

We will post how to create a eye ball tree topper for your Halloween tree, show some of our halloween collectibles etc. It should be a spooktaluar time. So tell your friends and stop on by Saturday Oct 18th for a fanciful and swirly time.

Decorating for Halloween

Through out the month of October we thought we would share some of the fun decorations & collectibles we have been buying over the years. We love this time of year and look forward to preparing for the big day: All Hallows Eve. Here is a something we came across this season. This cool 13" tall canister with a pumpkin head top. Can't you just see this item sitting on your Halloween entry table filled with candy corn candies or black ornaments blubs or maybe creepy rubber eyes balls. Spooky!

How do you like to decorate for Halloween? Share with us some of your fun Halloween finds.

** Coming up on our next post well let you know about the Halloween BLOG party happening on the 18th of October.

What a Treat from Matthew Mead

We received a rather large package in mail today, at the studio. And we just had to share it with everyone. The package was from Matthew Mead ,the author of the Matthew Mead Halloween Tricks and Treats book. We posted here on our blog our review of his book and submitted it to another blog who was having a contest. To our surprise and delight we were one of the winners! What a treat! Check it out– we thought we were just getting an autograph copy of his book but oh no, we got sooo much more....



All these treats came in a cool orange photo box. The box was wrapped with a festive ribbon and carried a handmade Halloween tag. The presentation was so nice we didn't want to open it. Inside the box, there was lots of fun treats: a black bag and a handmade box full of goodies and a wonderful little ceramic owl that was photographed in the Owl-oween Party chapter in the Halloween book.



The box was sealed with ribbon and had this fun Halloween tag on it.



Along with the autograph Halloween book Matthew included a preview of his new Entertaining Simple book. Thanks again Matthew for the treats!!

Our seasonal Swirly Stickers have arrived!

We received at the studio this week our new swirly circle stickers. If you have been to our craft show or have purchased one of our ornaments you know what we are talking about. For those who haven't... each of our ornaments comes in it's own box and is sealed with a colored vellum band and has our circle sticker on it. At first we only had a green sticker for the holidays and then last year we made a hot pink design for our Valentine collection. Now, since we are doing different holidays we just ordered one for Autumn and one for Spring. These may seem so simple, but they add such a nice touch to the look of the package and make it look special. Have a nice weekend!




So here the one we use for the Holidays

our Valentine sticker

our new Autumn sticker


and here is our new Spring sticker