I saw Halloween merchandise in a store yesterday.
And I got really excited!
I was in Michael's, looking for supplies for an altered art project for a swap I'm participating in, and saw that there were some random bits of Halloween merchandise on a few end caps around the store. Not a lot, but enough to get me excited. Because Halloween is my favorite holiday. And knowing it's coming up means that the weather *will* eventually be cooling off. Which is even more of a reason to get excited.
Usually I'm happy to wait until the beginning of September before thinking much about Halloween though. But I had a reason to take notice this year.
The main reason why I was looking around in Michael's was to find supplies for an altered Halloween themed shadow box swap I'm participating in. You take a shadow box with compartments (or take the open kind and make compartments in it) and decorate the individual compartments. Some are deeper and have more objects in them. Some are shallower and use more scrapbook or papercrafting kinds of techniques. Mine is going to be on the shallower side I believe and a blend of papercraft and objects. The person I'm crafting for wants something Goth and spooky/creepy/scary. I had an idea and went through all of my craft supplies and pulled out everything I thought would work with it so I can go from there. I also ordered a few key pieces of creepy embellishments for it, and they should be here next week. I've got about 6 weeks to finish gathering supplies and putting it together. There are a couple very specifically Halloween things I want to use on it and I will just have to wait before they show up in stores. But things like colored paper, paint, inks, etc... can be bought whenever, so I figured I might as well pick up what I need as I can find it that way I'm not rushing around like mad trying to source it all and put it together at the last minute.
