Princess Peach Halloween Costume with whats in your Closet

Halloween is here! It's kinda snuck up with all this crazy warm weather, so for those of you who let the costume planning skip by you here is something I whipped up with just what I had in my closet and craft drawers! I'm sure most of you have plenty of costumes just waiting to be discovered in your closet too :) 

With this being my second costume post for the season, and it doesn't even include my real costume, I'm sure you've realized I just like to dress up :) (Here's my first costume, Piñata & Birthday Girl)  It's a family thing I think and this blog just gave me the perfect excuse to come up with fun ideas this year.

For this Princess Peach costume I seriously just dug through my closet and craft supplies. I picked the costume because I knew I had a pink skirt and top and figured going from there was easy. And it was!

Like I said up there I started with finding my base pieces, a pink tank top and a pink skirt. I then dug up some old white dress socks, a roll of tulle, a headband, card stock, paint, and the Dollar Store skirt I bought for Tepes costume earlier this year.

I couldn't follow the dress exactly but I'm pretty sure that adding tulle for sleeves gave the illusion of puffy princess sleeves. Adding the small skirt over my original skirt gave me the layering affect. And finally painting that bejeweled crown looks just as good as hers!

This costume was so fun, so easy, and so cheap! I mean come on, free costume? Why wouldn't you play dress up :) Plus I needed a reason to make a photo booth...

You can check out my super cheap and easy Dollar Store Halloween Photo Booth from last week for a super easy and fun activity for your halloween party!

With Halloween so close I hope y'all have made your plans! I'm excited to hear what y'all are dressing up as :) 

Cheap Halloween Photo Booth

Eek so close!

2 weeks is an acceptable time to start decorating. We don't have neighbors so we wont have any trick or treaters so instead Reed and I are throwing a party! You can check out the invites I sent out HERE. But today I got ready by starting to decorate for our big party! 

As always I LOVE the Dollar Store. I can walk around there for hhooouurrsss. I mean so much goodness for just A DOLLAR! It is just so inspiring :)
For this party we've obviously asked everyone to dress up, and why dress up if you aren't going to document it! So I've decided that a fun Halloween photo booth is the perfect way to make sure we document all our creative ideas.

This photo booth took less than 30 minutes and cost less than $10!
I bought a white table cloth and hung it on the back porch and used that as the back drop. Then I began draping the Halloween goodies all over. As much as I love to make my own decorations it is really great when you can just buy pre-made decorations and arrange them on your own. So much quicker!

These goodies came in packs and I had SO MUCH more left over I think I'll be able to use it for the table scape too!
And who doesn't want glittery flies. I mean so cool!!

Of course I had to try out my new photo booth! So here's my second costume. Yes, second costume. My first one for the season was this Piñata and Birthday Girl get up with my puppy :) I'll be sharing how I made this Princess Peach costume from goodies laying around the house!

How are you getting ready for Halloween? I'm so excited and can't wait to see how all of y'all celebrate this fun holiday.

DIY Party Invitation using Rhonna Designs and After Light Phone Apps

Hey heyyyyy! 

I've been doing a good bit for Halloween this year, I'm pretty stoked cause this is the first time Reed and I will really do the Holiday together. I don't know how we've missed it the other 5 years but we have. If you wanna see some of the other posts from my halloween ideas here is a cute idea for you and your puppy along with the tutorial on how to DIY your costume for under $11! 

So to celebrate our love (I mean my love) of dressing up we are throwing a Halloween party at the boondocks house! I love to through parties, decorate, have lovely food spreads, and design invitations. If I could I would send out invitations every time I asked a friend over for dinner. Sadly, most people don't do paper invitations any more so I decided to do a "text" invitation. I created a design on my phone that I could easily send to my friends with all the details. Just as fun as paper invites except ITS FREE! No postage, no paper costs, no ink costs. Man why don't I do this for everything...

I'm sure most of you have heard of Rhonna Designs, but for those of you who don't know what it is, it is a great phone app that allows you to edit photos. I use it pretty often when I need some digital artwork for my blog. I've even used it to create some business logos! Basically its the bomb and super fun to play with. 

It's .99 cents and totally worth all 99 pennies :)

1. To start off this invite I opened up my Rhonna Designs app and chose the glitter back ground and the size document that would fit a phone. (sorry I forgot to take pictures of these screens...)
2. I chose a font for my "header" of the invitation. Rhonna has like a bajillion awesome fonts so it may take a while to pick :) 

3. Once I had my header in place click on the top right green button it then opens up a side bar and choose the MASK option. 

4. Once you open up the MASK tab you will see a few options at the top choose WHITE and flip the bottom button to ON(green) and then adjust your opacity.

5. Masking basically inverts what you see, so I wanted glitter text with a white back ground so using the mask allowed me to do that!

6. Once I saw the header in glitter I went to play with the fonts again by clicking on the T in the upper left corner.

Once you get your header the way you want SAVE THE IMAGE by clicking the upper left button and selecting SHARE at the bottom. 

At this point I had the header the way I wanted but the app didn't have the artwork I was looking for. Rhonna has a TON of awesome clip art when you click the second button on the top right (some star burst type design). But as I said for this invite she didn't have any thing I was really looking for so I googled an image and saved it to my phone along with the design.

1. Now open up your After Light app with your design from Rhonna Designs. After Light is a photo editing app for your phone that lets you adjust SO MUCH! It's probably the app I use the most on my phone. 
2.  Now choose the crop tab at the bottom of your screen (it is circled in red above).
3. That opens up a list of options and choose the double exposure option (also circled in red above).
4. now play around with the options and opacity. I chose darken and had the opacity about mid way. This allowed me to see the image of the bats THROUGH the original design from Rhonna.

Now save that work and open in back up in Rhonna Designs.

This part is fairly simple. Just play with your spacing and wording to get the invite just the way you like!
1. I started playing with placement.
2. I needed to add something to the bottom to balance the top but didn't want it to get to busy. I chose a simple circle but needed to match the color to the header. To do this select a color similar to the color you have in mind. In this case yellow, then click MORE!
3. More opens up the option for you to adjust the color manually. Play with each level until you have a color that matches what you are thinking!
4. I moved the matching circle to the bottom and now had a more balanced piece.

1. Start filling in your invite with the rest of your information! And don't forget to add some fun flair with different fonts :)
2. Using shapes to cut up a space can actually allow you to fit more information in with out it looking over crowded. 

3. Sticking with a simple color pallet lets you be more creative with your design. Here I used 4 fonts but only 2 colors so it broke up the information in readable chunks with out overwhelming the reader. 

So as you can tell I love these apps. They are some of the most used things on my phone. I LOVE playing with these two and think it is a great alternative to photo editing and design for people who don't have access to things like Photoshop.

Now I've just gotta send this bad boy out and hope people show up!

Dollar Store Piñata Costume

Last week I shared a a cute idea for a costume including you AND your dog! I mentioned that the costume was made with nothing but goods from my local Dollar Store, so here I am to share how I turned $10 of random goods in to a super cute costume for two! 

The puppy part was easy. I just purchased a little girls tutu, and birthday hat. 

The idea was to have Tepe hold the Piñata stick in her mouth but she wasn't interested.... 

The more time consuming part of the costume was my piñata outfit.
But it was pretty simple and involved just a few materials.
First be sure to get about 5 different color streamers, and a XL mens tshirt (one that is long enough to work as a dress).

Then I simply took a tank top of my own to trace the arm holes and neck line on the XL tshirt.

Then, starting from the bottom of the shirt, I pinned a single ribbon of a streamer and sewed it to the shirt. I continued this until I reached the top of my shoulders, alternating colors of course :)

Once you have all of your streamers sewn on to your t-shirt simple cut each streamer to create more texture. I had no method to my madness just cut cut cut!

And to finish off the costume I wore some colorful tights, leather boots, and added a gift bow to my hair. You could always take the Piñata thing further and make a head band with horns/ears like the traditional Piñatas have.

I loved this costume idea and wish that Tepe would have been a bit more corporative, but year and a half puppies never do what you expect I guess :) 

I mean just look at how miserable she looked...
I'm thinking we may have needed a smaller hat.

There you have it, a super easy and super cheap costume for two! Now tell me what you are planning to be for halloween, does it include your sweet little fur baby??

Birthday Girl & Piñata Halloween Costume for you and your puppy!

October is here and that means halloween is just a few days away! 

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. Mostly because growing up I always had a costume party with a hay ride and bon fire for my birthday (Oct. 27th). Plus my mom and grandmother where great at keeping their old clothes so we always had the best items to pick through for our costumes. Never have I ever been a store bought costume person and I vow to never become one :) 

I couldn't just dress up by myself. I mean group costumes are by far the best so I came up with something that Tepe and I could do together. So I introduce you to our Birthday Girl and Pinata Halloween Costumes! 

To make the costumes I spent $10 at our local Dollar Store and picked up 5 packs of streamers, an XL mens t shirt, birthday ribbons, birthday hat, and a little girls tutu.

The tutu and hat where for Tepe to transform in to the Birthday girl. 

And I was the piñata :) 

If you wanna see how I made the piñata costume it was super easy and I'm going to share how I made it later this week! 

Tepe wasn't so thrilled about the dress up idea so I struggled getting some pictures. If only I could show you all the out takes... dear Lord. 

The plan was for her to hold the stick in her mouth and to sit next to me and be super precious. But as you can tell she didn't like that plan so instead she sat next to me and looked super miserable. 

But hey, she doesn't hate me any more! I think if I down sized the hat a bit she would have been totally fine with it. She was just ready to play so she kept chewing on the hat and tutu... 

Maybe we will have better success with our next costume. 

Speaking of which be on the look out next week for the tutorial on how to make your own piñata costume and for a couple more ideas for you and your pup this Halloween season :) 

DIY Arrows with stone Arrowheads

Heyyyyyy! Labor day has passed and now it is officially acceptable to be decorating for fall! Even if it is still reaching the high 90's :) I've had our mantel done for about a week now and shared this IKEA frame hack earlier this week. If you are a weirdo attention person you may have noticed the arrows that were next to the frame. Well, incase you've been biting your nails waiting to see a post about them HERE IT IS! 

These lovely DIY Arrows came about while cleaning the house. Yep, I was inspired by cleaning- struggle #1 of a creative brain you can't see the world with out making some project out of it. Basically I was dusting off Reeds bedside table and found a huge pile of arrowheads he has found around the property. At first I placed them in a pretty jar so that they weren't just falling all over the place. Then as I moved on to the living room I realized how cool they would be on display! I mean they are very old arrowheads once used by the people who lived here so why not share the history with our guests! 

So obviously I stopped cleaning the house (struggle #2 not very many things get accomplished around here unless it is a fun project) and went about collecting supplies to make arrows to display these beautiful arrow heads with. I was trying not to make them too fake looking, by no means would these ever stay together when shot from a bow but I wanted to use materials that were a little more realistic than glitter and colored string :)

Here are the supplies I used:
Stone Arrowheads 

Semi straight twigs from the yard
White Craft feathers

Floral wire

Twine

Stripes of leather 

(yes I threw in some cool old tin and aqua leather just incase I needed them, but I ended up staying true to my roots and used only "natural" things for arrows) 

Then I dug around trying to find something I could split the twig with. I ended up using a cutting board, and x-acto knife with a flat edge blade. This way I could cut straight down and through the twig with out scaring myself :)

Here is the step by step to making your own decorative arrow.
1.Find a twig and arrowhead that look like they fit well together. ( I used a larger stick for this larger arrowhead so that I would be able to have a substantial amount of wood on either side). 
2. Cut straight down the center of the twig about a half inch. (You need enough room for the twig to pull apart and the arrow head to slide snuggly in.) 
3-4. Slide in your arrow head and adjust your twig until it is tightly in place
5. Wrap your floral wire around the twig pulling it back in and loop up around either side of the arrow head.
6. Use your twine or leather to hide the floral wire.

7. Pick out your feathers and wire them to the other end of the twig. 

8. Again, hide the wire with your twine or leather. 

WAHLA! ALL DONE!

Now, like I said before these are by no means sturdy. I'm sure if you have kids (or husbands) who want to play with them you could add a dab of hot glue to secure the stone arrowhead a bit better. But I knew Reed wouldn't be happy if I used hot glue because Native Americans wouldn't have used that. And boy was I right, he knit picked these arrows... Apparently Native Americans also didn't have floral wire or pick crooked sticks.... 

But they work lovely to display a couple of his arrowheads while not risking messing up any of the stones. I would have hated if these stone arrowheads would have lasted this long out in the weather but couldn't make it past the crafting of me!

So these lovely fellas are sitting on our mantel adding a bit of whimsy and history to it :)
What are you adding to your fall mantel this season??

Ikea Frame Hack

Fall is here! 

Well, football and school are here but the summer weather is still in full swing. But who cares, I'm going to get the house ready for all those cool nights and warm colored leaves. So first up is changing out our living room decorations to something a bit more "festive" :) 

So I bought this frame from Ikea a couple of weeks ago for a different reason. But then it wasn't the right size so I figured I'd come up with another use for it. It was the perfect size to replace the butterfly collection we had on the mantel before, but the clean white wasn't really meshing with everything else. To fix that I found a piece of scrap wood from the old horse barn on our property, and luckily is was just enough!

Then I measured, and cut the board in to 4 strips. 

Then angled the corners so they fit together "seamlessly".
Then I clamped the strips to the frame and flipped all of it over so we could see the frame. 

And finally I just pre-drilled and screwed the frame to its "new" face! 

So, there it is! My first Ikea hack!! And my first fall themed post for the year :) 

I love the way the old boards look with all of the other decor. And even though my cuts were a bit wonky and the boards didn't line up perfect, I think that just adds to the character of the wood!
This was a 2 hour revamp of our mantel so I can't wait until I really get to sit down with new decorations to give this room that cool autumn feel!

How are you welcoming in this cooler season?