Just look at this gorgeous thing.

Over at Seeing Things, Marilyn takes wonderful advantage of the striped “witch stockings” that show up around Halloween by making a spectacular wreath. I love the over-the-top trimmings.

The instructions are really simple, and obviously you could use any patterned stockings that you like: I think this would look great using black-and-white stripes as part of a Nightmare Before Christmas wreath, or spiderweb-patterned tights embellished with glittery spiders. Instead of a wreath, the covered styrofoam balls could also be strung together as a decorative garland. They might also be used individually as holiday ornaments; just hide the gathered ends with a tuft of curled ribbon (or a little plastic skull).

Costume tights are cheap and easy to find right now, although if you can bear to wait this is the kind of project where it really pays to stock up at after-Halloween clearance sales. Get a bunch of different patterns and experiment. A door wreath would make a nice hostess gift for a Halloween party as well.

These are pretty neat. I ran across them on Pinterest and tracked them down to HouseofDewberry on Etsy (which has lots of other neat stuff, too). The friend who pinned them speculated on doing a DIY version, and I think they should be pretty easy to hack together.

These are essentially heavily-hot-glued PVC candles, which are a popular Halloween prop. You can find a zillion different tutorials for making the basic candle with a bit of googling: Here’s a video tutorial, and there’s a nice overview here (omit the step where you fill them with insulation) with some additional tips here. Choose a pipe diameter that will let you slip a battery-powered tea light inside, since they’ll be used both as a wick and to illuminate the interior.

The eyes and mouth can be cut pretty easily: Use a marker to draw the holes (it’s all going to be painted, so it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes), making sure you leave enough space around them that the pipe won’t crack when you cut it). Drill a pilot hole (google “how to drill PVC pipe” for instructions such as this one), then cut the shape using a keyhole saw or Dremel tool.

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I ran across this splendid, betentacled dining-room set the other day, and originally assumed that it was from some offbeat furniture gallery. After a bit of digging around, I discovered that it’s actually the work of artist Christen Shaw; there are a couple of other views in her Flickr stream.

In that same stream is some other splendid furniture detailing, including a wonderful ouija board coffee table and an adorable baby ghost rocking chair.

Shaw’s designs are all hand-painted, but for those of us whose painting skills fall somewhere between “primitive” and “kindergarten,” something similar might be achieved using stencils. In particular, the monochromatic ouija board and the clean lines of the tentacles should lend themselves well to this process.

You can create the design you want in a computer graphics program, then print it out (a copy shop such as Kinko’s can print large designs that a home printer can’t handle) and turn it into a stencil. If you’ve never stenciled furniture before, there are loads of tutorials to get you started: This one from TLC provides a good overview of the whole process, and Royal Design Studio has some addtional useful tips.

Stenciling or painting is a great way to add character to bland, inexpensive furniture, and it can also breathe life into old pieces that you’re tired of looking at. Delicate spiderwebs, folk-art skulls, and other spooky accents are easy to do and are a lovely way to bring your own personal style to a room.

p.s. – Shaw also designs tattoos, so if you’re looking for something really unique you might check what she charges for commissions.

I ran across the Mosser* terrarium in an otherwise-unremarkable collection of decorations for an office cubicle and quite like the spare, simple design.

A bit of googling turns up a number of other moss terraria, such as this one at Uncommon Goods, housed in a recycled wine bottle. They also sell what they call “decorative terrarium creatures,” although I think we might have fundamentally different ideas about what constitutes a “creature.” There’s also Twig Terrariums, which sells a number of more-elaborate styles featuring several varieties of moss. (They also offer lockets, but those appear to use preserved lichen instead of live moss; a locket terrarium would be neat if you could pull it off, though.)

Fortunately, it’s also easy (and cheaper!) to make your own. To make a moss terrarium in its simplest form all you’ll need is a container, a hunk of moss, and something to park the moss on: It doesn’t really need dirt, but it needs something to hang on to.

The container can be just about anything: A glass jam jar, a lidded cake stand, an erlenmeyer flask, or a fish bowl. You can also get much fancier (and commensurately more expensive).

You can purchase moss online at places like Moss Acres, but you can also collect it in your back yard or in an abandoned field. (Some tutorials suggest collecting it from public parks or similar areas; I don’t know about other countries, but US laws tend to be pretty strict about collecting any kind of natural material from public lands.) Wherever you get it, make sure to harvest only a small amount from any particular patch so that you don’t destroy the rest of it.

You can also choose from a wide variety of substrates. If you want to use soil, something a bit on the acidic side such as peat-moss potting soil is a good choice. You can also use rocks, aquarium gravel, bark, or similar substances; you can encourage growth by painting the substrate with a bit of plain yogurt or buttermilk and then pressing the moss down on top.**

And, of course, you can get much fancier. Search for “moss terrarium tutorial” to find lots of suggestions such as the ones here, here, here, and here.

Care is easy: Keep it out of direct light and mist it with water occasionally. Moss is a particularly good choice of plant if you have a brown thumb, because it’s quite hardy and requires very little care. The association with spooky, overgrown places is just a lovely bonus.

*That link goes to a placeholder page; as of this writing, the Etsy store where they actually sell the product is down. The referring article listed the price as $26 US.

**Side note: An easy way to get rustic-looking mossy flowerpots is to toss a hunk of healthy moss into a blender with some yogurt or buttermilk and then paint the resulting slurry on the outside of terra-cotta pots. Mist occasionally until the moss takes hold.

Here’s a thing you might not know existed: Doorbells that you can load with a sound file of your choice.

Just like a phone ringtone, you can use your favorite sound effect, song, or movie clip, and change it as often as you like. That means that your doorbell can scream like the one in Murder by Death, or say, “You rang?” like Lurch. (If you don’t think that’s hilarious, you may be on the wrong blog.)

There are a number of manufacturers, and prices vary significantly. The cheapest that I could find is Honeywell’s My Chime, followed by Swann’s MP3 DJ Doorbell. Other options include Kakadu (a UK vendor, although I take mild exception to their assumption that the customer is male), YourBell, iChime, and The Tommyknocker, which wins the “best name” category.

This would, obviously, be a splendid novelty item for Halloween, but there’s no reason why visitors shouldn’t be treated to banshee wails or rattling chains year-round. I’ve wanted a screaming doorbell for years, and there’s no way I’m going to limit its use to one day a year.

The Sweeney Todd razorblade mirror designed by Phil Sims is all kinds of stylish, but at around $250 (US | UK) I’m afraid it’ll have to remain on my list of “things I would own if I were rich enough.”

Fortunately, at least for those in the UK, sendmeamirror.com has a much cheaper plain alternative. (There’s a US version available, but it also features a clock so it isn’t quite as stark.)

They’re sort of the ultimate in shaving mirrors.

(via Ghoulie Girls)

I recently ran across this neat vintage-y print depicting various bat species, which is gothy (hey, it’s bats) but has enough of a natural history vibe that it wouldn’t look out of place in a more mainstream decorating scheme. I decided to dig around for other batty art, and it turns out that there are lots of lovely prints available. (There are also plenty of prints depicting either baseball bats or cricket bats because search engines can’t tell the difference, but that’s a post for some other blog.)

Other examples in the natural history/educational vein include this 1834 print of a long-eared bat and a common bat, this drawing of a Brown Vespertlion, a line drawing of a vampire bat, and, in case you can’t settle on a single species, chart featuring a couple dozen varieties.

If photographs are more your thing, there are several lovely images of individual bats in flight, like this artistic photo of a long-nosed bat with its wings spread or this neat triple exposure of a fruit bat. There are also some great shots of bats feeding on nectar or echolocating, and if you like massed bats this “cloud of bats” and this (very cool) shot of a huge flock flying overhead are particularly striking. There are also scientific illustration-type photos of bat skeletons, like this photo of an articulated skeleton and this unusual black-and-white image.

There are also lots of paintings, woodcuts, and drawings of bats, like Van Gogh’s Flying Fox, Albrecht Dürer’s prints of a single specimen and another in two poses, and this rather country/primitive painting by Anthony Maynard. There’s also The Witch’s Sister, which reminds me of an illustration from a children’s book, an art deco-ish Fledermaus poster, and a neat Russian poster for the Bat Theatre. If you want something a little creepier, check out Thomas Theodor Heine’s print of a monstrous vampire bat draining its victim or this illustration of vampire bats attacking a sleeping girl.

If you’ve got a bare spot on a wall, what better way to dress it up than bats?

The intrepid pdq recently pointed me to this splendid wreath of snakes from Grandin Road, made especially fabulous by being motion-sensitive.

If you don’t care about the motion aspect, you can make a similar wreath at a fraction of the cost. Grapevine wreaths are widely available at craft stores or online, and if you have access to grapevines you can also make your own. Rubber snakes are common novelties, especially around Halloween, so you should be able to find them at party or craft suppliers or at online retailers like Oriental Trading. Put the two together, and you’ve got yourself a wreath.

The wreath at the Grandin Road site appears to be black, so you can spray-paint the wreath or leave it natural as desired. If the snakes are particularly lurid colors, you can spray-paint them black or various shades of tan and brown (make sure you use paint that won’t deteriorate the rubber). You can also get artsy and add detailing with metallic paint, hot-glue rhinestones into their eyes (or down their backs), or twine them with ribbon.

The snakes can be attached with hot glue, but a good way to fasten them more securely is to impale them on a bit of floral wire: Run a couple inches of wire inside the snake, secure the entry point with a dot of hot glue, then bend out the rest of the wire and wrap it around the vines in the wreath. Finish with a big ribbon bow or a few black silk roses.

You could also expand beyond snakes and use rubber insects, fake eyeballs, or any other weird novelty item that strikes your fancy. Putting it up at Halloween is entirely optional; I see no reason why it couldn’t be left up year ’round.

This is simply brilliant.

Jen of Tatertots and Jello decided to take Ali Edwards’ lovely punch collages and make them a little darker. She used some Martha Stewart craft punches shaped like spiders and bats and some Halloween-themed paper to create a spooky (and completely humane) version of a butterfly collection.

She’s got a full tutorial with lots of photos and some great suggestions for doing this project on the cheap.

The article seems to suggest that she views these as seasonal decorations and only brings them out around Halloween, but that’s just crazy talk; these are attractive enough to leave up all year.

(via Ghoulie Girls)

Sculptor Michael Locascio trained as a classical artist, with anatomy work featuring skeletons and cadaver dissections. He’s recently opened an Etsy shop featuring “the macabre, the mythic, and the unusual,” and drawing inspiration from catacombs and tombs. There’s some lovely stuff, heavy on the skulls and tentacles.

The selection is limited to candleholders, wall plaques, and wine stoppers at the moment, but there appear to be plans to expand. There’s also a companion URL, http://www.dellamorteco.com/, which currently redirects to the Etsy shop but might offer an expanded variety in the future. Pretty!

(Hat tip to Brenda)