Treasuries are member-curated “shopping galleries” of items on Etsy. Member KnitzyBlond created one called The Non-Traditional Bride filled with all kinds of lovely items like this gorgeous red silk wedding dress and these rose tattoo shoes. Hopefully she’ll be adding more items soon; she has excellent taste.

Even if you aren’t in the market for alt wedding stuff, the Etsy treasuries are fun to browse. You can find collections devoted to motorcycles and leather, scarabs, “lost in the dark…”, brains, and all manner of other interesting themes.

(via Halloween weddings)

The PSDtuts site has a great tutorial for making a turn-of-the-(last)-century Vaudeville poster with faux hand-tinting. It’s slightly advanced for a Photoshop novice, but if you’re reasonably familiar with the tool this isn’t too difficult. I love the vintage look of the finished work.

This would be a great decoration for a party or prop for an RPG, and would also make wonderful party invitations. (Somewhere deep in the recesses of my admittedly-addled brain I’ve got the notion that Carrie Mae did her wedding invitations like a vaudeville poster, but I may be hallucinating that. It’s a neat idea, either way.)

The site makes the complete layered Photoshop files for its tutorials available for download with membership ($9 for one month, reduced amounts for multiple months). If you’re planning to tackle this project it might be worth a short-term membership to have a completed version available for reference.

(This is a rare Saturday post because I don’t like to flog my own site during your regularly-scheduled weekday darkness.)

I blogged a while back about MrX Designs and mentioned that he was going to create some Book of Shadows-style guest books for the store.

They have arrived, and they are wonderful. He also created some lovely quill pens with hand-cast skull detailing, and we’ve even got some ink bottles with pentacles on the tops.

I can’t express how thrilled I am with the quality of the work. I’m all a-flutter.

I am completely in love with this ouija-themed wedding invitation by Corndog Industries. The envelope even turns into a planchette when opened.

Erin Blankley, who is apparently the Chief Corndog, creates all kinds of offbeat custom invitations and announcements. I also really like this medieval scroll and this cute little skeleton. Her ideas are wonderfully quirky and original.

The site is relatively sparse, but the “more invite info” link includes some pricing and contact information. If you’re in the market for custom invitations or just want to admire her creativity, go take a look!

(via Oddee – Other interesting wedding invitations at the link)

David Malki (who does the wonderful comic Wondermark) and his wife were both working in movie advertising when they first got engaged, so they made a promo poster and movie “trailer” for the wedding. Their wedding cake was action movie-themed, and it is utterly awesome. You can see the cake, trailer, and larger version of the movie poster here.

If you’re looking around for a wedding theme of your own, this would be a really fun thing to do. You could obviously go gothier with a vampire- or slasher-type “movie,” and use the motif for everything from invitations to reception decor. I just love the originality and whimsy of this idea, particularly because there are so many ways to tie it in to various wedding details.

You are welcome.

San Francisco artist Jeanie M hand-makes* each topper by stuffing the mice and then posing them in detailed little costumes. I’m assuming she’s also the person behind the skunk in Edwardian costume and the other mouse specimens on the same site.

These are kind of adorable, and would certainly be a unique cake topper. The mice make it appropriately gothy, but I can see it working especially well for a fairy-tale themed wedding.

(via Dabbled)

*This is probably unnecessary to say. I can’t imagine there’d be a machine for making them.

Body wraps are popular in spas these days; they help tone and tighten the skin and can soothe minor skin ailments. (They’re also reported to help “detoxify” the body and eliminate cellulite but I haven’t actually seen any scientific studies on that so I wouldn’t necessarily expect miracles.) A spa visit is expensive, but the ingredients for a homemade body wrap are cheap and easy to obtain. Most of the ingredients are available at the grocery store, and the others can be found at soap supply companies (like Majestic Mountain Sage or Snowdrift Farm), some health food stores, or Amazon.

Equipment:

• Wrap sheets – You can purchase “mud sheets,” but thin towels or even Ace bandages are fine.
• A mixing bowl.
• A nonreactive (stainless steel or enamel) pot with at least a gallon capacity.
• A nonreactive (stainless, plastic, or wooden) spoon.

Ingredients:

• 8 cups (2 quarts) of water
• 2 cups of cosmetic clay – Choose Bentonite if you have oily skin and Kaolin if your skin is dry.
• 1 cup of salt – Any kind will work: Sea salt (which may include additional minerals), “cosmetic” salts like Hawaiian Red or Himalayan Pink, or plain old kosher salt. Don’t use table salt that has an anti-caking agent added. You can also replace some or all of the salt (sodium chloride) with epsom salts (potassium chloride).
• 1 cup of powdered seaweed – Use one or a mixture of kelp, Irish moss, bladderwrack, or other seaweeds.
• 1 cup of powdered herbs – Use one or a mixture of herbs such as green tea, peppermint, lavender, chamomile, or rose petals. You can powder dried herbs yourself in a blender or food processor. Take care when using flowers (such as chamomile) if you tend to have pollen allergies, and if you’re pregnant make sure you research whether your chosen herb can cause health problems (goldenseal, mugwort, and pennyroyal can call cause uterine contractions, for instance).

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The Ghostess took leave of her senses got really ambitious and decided to make little “spell book” invitations for her annual Dead End party. She’s posted a tutorial on how she made them, including information on burning the edges and doing the nice hand-stippling on the covers.

It’s a lot of effort for invitations, but you can’t beat them for style. This would be fantastic invitations for a spooky dinner party or a (small, lest you lose your mind) wedding. As with most of the projects I particularly admire, these lend themselves well to an assembly-line approach, and you can do a bit whenever you have some spare time.

Also check out her main invitations page for previous years’ designs. I especially like 2006, with the little “eye of newt” bottles.

Here’s one of those head-slappingly simple ideas that I wish had occurred to me. Curious Goods has a tutorial for making fake wax seals out of hot glue, and Carrie Mae has taken it one step further and is using them to decorate her wedding invitations. I know you can purchase fake seals that won’t shatter in the mail, but I never thought about making my own.

If you don’t want to mess around with spray paint, you can use colored hot glue for the “wax.” You can carve your own stamp design out of an eraser if you want (although if you’re turning out a lot of stamps it might not hold up), but wax stamps are fairly inexpensive and come in lots of attractive designs (spiders, spider webs, skulls, and bats among them). For one-time use a cheap ink stamp set like this one might work too.

This is a lovely way to add gothic elegance to wedding invitations, and instead of trying to find commercial faux wax seals in the color and design you want, you can create whatever you desire easily and cheaply. Brilliant!

A reader wrote me with a question about her upcoming Halloween wedding. I gave her a few suggestions, but figured I’d ask my wonderful and creative readers for their ideas as well.

Shauna asks:

My fiance and I are planning to get married October 23, 2010. We are planning on having a traditional nonreligious ceremony and a halloween themed reception. Our idea is to have a haunted house feel for our reception complete with the guest changing into costumes during cocktail hour. I am going to have a bit of trouble though. The colors. My fiance and I are having pink and green [like a rose petal pink and clover green] for the ceremony. Now, I know nothing of planning a wedding but I’m hoping its not going to be too tough trying to incorporate pink and green into a haunted house theme. As crazy as this may sound, it is important to us that we do have pink and green as the colors [I wanted black and orange but we decided on pink and green because we always invisioned those being our colors.] I was just wondering if maybe you had any suggestions as to how we could use pink and green in our haunted house theme. I’m very open to suggestions and I’m not trying to make the who reception in pink and green but I do want the colors some how incorporated.

What do you think? How would you incorporate some very non-haunty colors into a haunted reception?