This is just adorable. Craftster member isfive is decorating her son’s nursery, but she can’t paint the walls because she’s renting. Instead she’s adding a big dollop of color by hand-stenciling this fantastic dresser. There are photos on her Craftster post and great project details on her blog.

I love the clean graphic look of the stencils, and this is just a wonderful (and inexpensive!) way to bring some color to a room without painting the walls. I particularly like stencils because they don’t require the artistic level that hand-painting does, so you can turn out professional-looking results with relatively little effort.

Obviously, you could go a bit darker by replacing the pterodactyls with bats; it would still be cute for a child’s room if they were nonthreatening fairy-tale sorts of bats, perhaps issuing from a castle window. For a more grown-up look, you might use bolder colors and spookier bats. Other creepy critters with strong silhouettes would also be good candidates for the stencil treatment: A dresser with drawers that alternated spiders and webs would be wonderfully dramatic.

(via CRAFT)

I’ve mentioned DadCanDo in the past, but since they’ve done a bit of reorganizing I wanted to call your attention to The Dragonry.

It’s a whole section of dragon-related items, like these dragon eggs made from blown eggs and hot glue, the Dragon Hunter’s Goggles which could double as an inexpensive Steampunk accessory, and loads more. The projects are fairly easy and use readily-available materials, and they’are a marvelous source of inspiration.

A “real” dragon’s egg would make a wonderful and unique gift for a child (or a Harry Potter-obsessed adult). It appears that their example uses a chicken egg, but since it’s embellished with hot glue and then painted there’s no reason you couldn’t use a larger plastic or wooden egg instead. Add some suitable documentation as to the egg’s provenance and perhaps a pretty wooden box to keep it in, and you’d have a lovely display piece.

This was posted with no attribution over at Spooky is as Spooky Does and my Google-Fu is apparently not strong enough to find where it came from, but it is so awesome that I wanted to share it. If I had this pram I’d make my kids ride in it until they were in college.

Update: jessica’s Google-Fu is stronger than mine. She identified Zombie Kingdom as the creator of this piece. Thanks, jessica! (And props to Oldhalloween for recognizing the location as Burning Man.)

As is customary, I have to show off my little guy in his Halloween finery (click to enlarge).

I predicted last year that it was probably the last Halloween when I was going to be allowed to dictate his costume, but fortunately he’s become rather passionate about wizards so it wasn’t too hard to chivvy him in that direction. Someday, though, he’s going to come home and announce that he wants to be Spiderman and then my little brocade-and-velvet-loving heart is going to shatter into a million pieces.*

This portrait will join the others in my Halloween gallery: We do a professional 8×10 photo of him in costume every year, choose an appropriate-looking frame (this one will go in a bronze frame with lots of twisty metal bits), and add it to the lineup. It’s a nice year-round reminder of our favorite holiday.

What are you doing for Halloween this year?

*And then I’ll sweep up the pieces and start figuring out how I can make him a functional web shooter, because my family motto is, “If a Thing is Worth Doing, it is Worth Overdoing.” But that’s another post.

One nice thing about little kids is that gross things make them giggle. Sipping Spiders Through a Straw would be an absolute laff riot for the graham cracker set, since it adds creepy lyrics to popular campfire songs and pairs them with appropriate pictures. “My Delicious Frankenstein” (In a kitchen, in a castle/filled with mold and turpentine/lived a baker, monster maker/and her true love Frankenstein) features a monster with whipped cream and a cherry, and Zombie Midge (Zombie Midge is falling down, rolling round, all through town/Zombie Midge is falling down/My pale lady) has maggots dribbling off her edges.

The artist is the splendidly-named Gris Grimly, who’s illustrated similar works (such as Wicked Nursery Rhymes I and II and Where Madness Reigns). His stuff somehow manages to be macabre and whimsical at the same time.

This would be a great gift for a slightly-morbid child (in other words, all of them), or for an adult with a dark sense of humor. It’d be fun to bust out the alternate lyrics around the campfire and simultaneously amuse the kids and unsettle the adults. Fun for the whole family!

I recently ran across the Romanti-Goth Coloring Book (A is for Absinthe, F is for Fishnets…) and Baby’s First Mythos and was inspired to put together a list of amusingly gothy books that might appeal to children. (I can vouch for most of these personally, as they’ve already been run past the Shadowspawn.)

For very young kids, try:

Halloween Countdown – A great way to teach small children their numbers: A boy with a houseful of whimsical ghosts counts them down from 10 to 1.

Mommy? – A little boy wanders through a haunted house, looking for his mommy. Rather than being frightened by the monsters he encounters, he bests them all in amusing ways.

Bats at the Beach and its sequel Bats at the Library – Cute little bats cavort in the moonlight and engage in human activities that will tickle small kids.

Beneath the Ghost Moon – A beautifully illustrated poem by SF/fantasy author Jane Yolen about mice whose costume ball is disrupted by “Crawlies.”

Goodnight Goon – A parody of the old standard “Goodnight Moon,” this involves a little werewolf getting ready for bed in his haunted castle.

There’s a Nightmare in my Closet – A little boy decides to stand up to the thing in his closet, which turns out to be frightened of him.

Bunnicula – Slightly longer than the ones mentioned above (and a proper story instead of a picture book), this classic involves a dog and cat’s quest to unmask the family’s new pet bunny as a vampire.

The slightly older set might enjoy:

Read the rest of this entry »

Etsy seller cherylasmith makes whimsically spooky little finger puppets, including skeletons, zombies, and bats. The designs are simple enough for a DIY project, but since she sells them for a mere $5 each it’s almost cheaper to let her do the work for you.

A collection of these would be a cute desk accessory or, if you can bear to part with them, a unique gift for a child. Pair them with a handmade desktop or doorway puppet theater for hours of creepy fun.

Be sure to check out the seller’s other listings. I especially like her voodoo-inspired Speak No Evil brooch.

Author Daniel Pinkwater has just released The Yggyssey, a Young Adult book about a girl who lives in a haunted hotel.

When I got home from school, my room was full of ghosts…again! They were being invisible, but I could feel the cold spots in the air.

“Did I speak to you ectoplasms about this, or did I not?” I asked the empty room.

Silence. The ghosts were dummying up.

“Rudolph Valentino! I can smell your lousy cigar!”

There was a faint smell of cigar smoke, the trademark of the ghostly Valentino, so I knew he was among them. And my bedspread was rumpled. Probably they were sitting on my bed, playing cards.

“Look, you spectres–this is a young girl’s bedroom, not a club! Why do you have to hang out here all the time? You have an eight-story hotel to haunt. There’s a complete apartment reserved for your personal use. Why don’t you stay there? It’s the nicest one in the whole building.”

The management had sealed off a large apartment because it was way too haunted for living guests to put up with. The hope was that if they gave the ghosts their own space they wouldn’t haunt the rest of the hotel so much. Some hope.

“We get bored,” Rudolph Valentino said. “It’s nothing but ghosts there.”

“So you crowd in here so you can bore me, and stink up my room,” I said. I was mad. I really liked most of the ghosts, but a woman is entitled to some privacy.

Grumbling and mumbling, the ghosts climbed out my bedroom window, made their way along the ledge, and climbed into the window of the apartment that had belonged to Valentino in 1927. I had been in the apartment lots of times. Like the ghosts, I had to climb out my window and go along the narrow ledge to get in, which was a little scary to do if you weren’t already dead.

Pinkwater is also serializing the book, one chapter a week, onilne for free. (It looks like the free online version is probably a limited-time thing; he did something similar with his book The Neddiad–to which The Yggyssey is a sequel–a couple of years ago, but that site is now being cybersquatted.)

I doubt I’ll wait for the whole thing online; I’m sufficiently hooked by the first few chapters that I think I’ll be adding this to Shadowboy’s bookshelf in the near future.

(via BoingBoing)

Here are a few items I’ve run into recently that might be of interest to anyone with small creatures running around that you’re expected to dress.

Etsy sellers Lou and Lee make all kinds of goth/hipster baby clothes, including onesies with cameo fronts or vintage lace detailing. They’re apparently sold out at the moment, but a crafty individual might be able to run up something similar.

Mysterio T-shirts – This powerful oracle “transmits his thoughts onto 100% cotton baby T-shirts,” predicting the baby’s future profession. The shirts have a vintage sideshow kind of look to them, and professions include things like “Mafia Accountant” and “Romance Novelist.”

LED Booties Tutorial – Instructions for wiring baby booties with flashing “fireflies.” These would be awesome if you substituted monster eyes for firefly rears.

Neatorama has a selection of cool onesies and baby T-shirts, including this “I (heart) Anatomy” design, with anatomically-correct heart.

The Baby Straenj site offers all kinds of handmade goodies, like these adorable twirl skirts and skull overalls.

If nothing else, these examples might inspire you to make something similar yourself. My standard gift for baby showers is a handmade crib quilt, but some of these clothes are so cute I may have to start branching out.

Picture Credit: Sculpture by artist Shi Jinsong

Here’s the perfect item for the young maniacal inventor on your gift list: Alphabet blocks lovingly engraved with a different mad scientific motif. Original pen-and-ink drawings are laser-engraved (natch) onto maple blocks, and they’re just gorgeous. The set of five includes all of the themes that any well-rounded mad scientist should explore:

A – Appendages | B – Bioengineering | C – Caffeine | D – Dirigible | E – Experiment | F – Freeze ray | G – Goggles | H – Henchmen | I – Invention | J – Jargon | K – Potassium | L – Laser | M – Maniacal | N – Nanotechnology | O – Organs | P – Peasants (with Pitchforks) | Q – Quantum physics | R – Robot | S – Self-experimentation | T – Tentacles | U – Underground Lair | V – Virus | W – Wrench | X – X-Ray | Y – You, the Mad Scientist of Tomorrow | Z – Zombies

It’s never too early to teach your children mad science proficiency, and once they’ve grown up and begun an illustrious career reanimating dead tissue and launching laser satellites these blocks would make a lovely desk accessory or source of evidence when the FBI shows up with questions.

Link (via BoingBoing)

(Also check out the “Mr. Bitey” personal organizer on the same site. I want one of these for my desk.)