Shivers of Delight

Well, well, well. I'm back!  It's been too long and believe me when I say I've thought about this blog and my followers nearly everyday since my last post. Lots of life got in the way, but Halloween is in my blood and somehow I knew I'd be back.  The thing that jump started my heart was the 2023 Fall Collection of pottery from Ephraim Pottery ! Oh my gosh, it's fantastic. I've always had a warm spot in my heart for Arts & Crafts style pottery (especially if it depicted bats or spiders) and so when the new collection popped up I was giddy. Ephraim Pottery is a small collective of pottery artists headed by ceramicist Kevin Hicks in Wisconsin. I've kept my eye on their shop for years (I first posted about them in 2014) just waiting for the right piece to speak to me and this is the year! Their collections are small because every piece is made by hand and often the pieces are limited releases.  Take a look at these. Fright Night Ceramic Bowl Antiquity Potte...

My winter project this year is switching my dining room and Halloween art gallery rooms so that I'd have more room for my art collection. My original schedule was to have the dining room moved and finished by the end of January, leaving February and March for the art gallery space. I'm a little behind schedule- no surprise there, but have enough of the dining room done to give you a peek. This was the Halloween art gallery as I was taking it apart to re-design it as the dining room. I stripped the room bare and started painting. The wall color choice is based on a purple I use throughout the downstairs. There are different tones of this purple, but it's used in our laundry room, kitchen, living room and the former dining room. It's sometimes used as an accent wall and sometimes covers all the walls. Grey also features largely throughout the downstairs. (That's Uncle Rufus in the photo who supervised me the entire time.) I knew that I didn't want the energy of or...

Bonnie is a graphic designer who loves making paper snowflakes. Of course, what caught my eye are her Halloween paper cuts in her Etsy shop BibBon .  Haunted House and Spiders Paper Ornament Cats and the Fall Moon Spiders and Eyes Witch Hats and Cauldrons Pumpkins and Bats Ghosts and Spiderweb You can order these lovely paper ornaments in a variety of sizes. I think they're adorable!

I happened upon some beautiful skull rings designed by Andrea Sciacca. Her shop, located in Genoa, Italy, is called Fingers Overkill . I like the medieval mood of these rings. They're not shiny and delicate- they mean business. Skull Ring Memento Mori Ring Yattaman Skull Ring Era Ring Anatomical Heart Ring Fly Necklace You'll also find many sea creature designs in the shop. It's all so fascinating.

Panoramic photo of the Halloween art gallery being emptied Last week I talked about my 2023 project to redesign our Halloween art gallery room in our house. Over the weekend, I started taking down shelves, rearranging furniture, and pondering the color of the walls. Once the room was fairly empty, I started thinking about how I could add some furniture to the room so that I, or others, could actually sit there and use it.  You see, the room gets little use unless someone is just standing there looking at my collection. That is fairly rare. I thought maybe a few chairs and a low table or maybe just a reading nook would work, but as I dragged chairs into the room, I realized it was too small for all the things I wanted.  Then I caught my husband just standing in the empty room looking around. I asked him how he thought we could use the room and the words I had been dreading came forth from his lips "I think we should make it the dining room again and move the gallery to the doub...

For many years, I posted almost daily on the blog highlighting different Halloween artists that caught my attention. I stopped doing that last year for several reasons: I was exhausted, I thought maybe Instagram had made the posts irrelevant, and there were changes in the artists that were using Etsy making it more difficult for me to find new (to me) artists that I found inspiring. I've decided to restart these posts, but I'll post maybe one or two a week until I see if it feel right. The Gnarled Branch on Etsy caught my eye this week. David Irvine is the Toronto artist behind the shop and he started painting over or adding to thrift store paintings he found. I find those fun, but Irvine's original art work is what has captured my attention. The Goblin Mayor The Cemetery Wanderer Hallowe'en Painting Dead Ringer Morbid Clown Hallowe'en Clock I'm really draw to the the Dead Ringer and Morbid Clown! Visit Irvine's shop.

This year one of my home projects is to redesign our Halloween art gallery. That's what I call the room that used to be our dining room. We live in a mid-to-late nineteenth-century house that was built by someone who meant well, but didn't have all the necessary skills. You know what I mean: no right angles, a tilted floor, cock-eyed windows, no closets, and odd sized rooms. I call them the prominent character defining features. The small room off of our kitchen never seemed to serve us well. It started as a dining room, but my inherited dining room set from my grandparents was just a bit too large for the space and I always felt claustrophobic there. I moved the dining room to our double-parlor and it has remained there since. My next idea was to make the small room into a drinking parlor with a bar and a trestle table, but who's kidding who? Our entire house is a drinking parlor! It wasn't until I started running out of room to display my Halloween art collection that...