The marvelous xJane sent me a link to this spider pillow on Etsy, along with the comment:

This would be super easy to make oneself: just applique/embroider some spiders onto a damask-style pillow covering (either before you make the pillow case if you’re so inclined, or on one that was bought in a store after-the-fact). I think a more subtle one spider off to the side would be cuter, but to each one’s own (and, of course, the limit needn’t be “spiders on pillows”). Cute for a Victorian/gothic themed couch.

I quite agree. The Etsy listing doesn’t offer a lot of detail on the materials, but the tags on the item suggest that the spiders are felt appliques. A standard square pillow is very easy to make, and if applique isn’t your thing (I’m really not sure how well the felt would hold up over time), you could embroider or even paint the design on the fabric. I like the elegant look of the jacquard fabric, and if you nestled a little spider up in the corner it would be a secret bit of goth on an otherwise normal-looking pillow.

The seller has several other appliqued pillows with darkish themes; I quite like the Nevermore raven one as well.

I often do a fortune-telling schtick at parties–in fact, I’m fairly sure that an ex-co-worker keeps inviting me to her Halloween parties because I do tarot readings for her other guests–and because I’m far more interested in the entertainment value than “real” divination,* I generally bill myself as Madame Gazpacho Zorka (Cheaper Than a Consultant, Same Results). I’ve occasionally toyed with making a wooden sign advertising my “services,” but I suck enormously at freehand drawing and I never seem to get around to trying my hand at stenciling.

Fortunately, I was browsing around on Etsy recently and found somebody who specializes in just that. Tracy of The Homespun Raven offers a huge variety of premade stenciled signs, and she also does custom orders.

I asked her to combine a couple of her stock stencils (she can arrange to have a custom one made just for you, but it costs quite a bit extra) with my desired wording, and was quite pleased with the result. She works very quickly, and her signs are really quite affordable.

Even if you don’t have any designs on a custom piece, be sure to check out her premade stuff. I really like the rustic/vintage look of the signs, and pieces like this ouija board or this tavern sign might be the perfect thing to spruce up a bare wall.

*If you’d like to “tell fortunes” the way I do, check out the guide to bluffing your way through the tarot I wrote a while back.

Rollout Creative is a Canadian firm which specializes in very cool wallpaper. They have a line of unusual artist series stock wallpaper, but their real forte is custom work. They have artists on staff which can help you design exactly what you’re looking for, plus they offer printing services if you want to supply artwork of your own.

The site includes photos of past work (I especially like the designs they did for Joey’s and Worth) which are worth browsing just for inspiration.

The site doesn’t list prices, but I’m sure they’re not cheap. However, if you’re looking for high-quality wallpaper to complete your perfect decorating scheme, they might be worth it.

(via Haunt Style)

The Fabulous Miss Doxie is a Halloween-decorating fool, as she explains:

People, I love Halloween with an unrestrained passion. My love for Halloween is Not Normal. Nobody in my family knows where this came from. We are the kind of family that carves a pumpkin, MAYBE two, and that is all. We do not fuck about with spiderwebs and mood lighting. We open the door, dole out a Three Musketeers or a Snickers, and that is the end of the matter.

But something in my genetic makeup was dissatisfied with that arrangement, and somehow, y’all, I have become…I have become That Person who feels the need to decorate the everloving HELL out of her house. I am That Person who BUYS those full-sized skeletons, hanging witches, and packages of fake spiderwebs. I am That Person, and That Person is me, and together, we are a nutbag.

She recently posted some photos of this year’s decorating efforts to Flickr, and oh I am passionately in love with this side table. It is, obviously, meant to be just a Halloween decoration and I’m sure that something a little less unusual occupies its depths during the rest of the year, but holy crap I want this table year-round. I think it’s because the bones look real instead of fakey-plastic, and they’re so artfully arranged and look so elegant on top of the dirt. The dirt-and-bone color scheme matches the shabby-chic distressed paint on the table nicely, too.

The bones have enough of an archaeological-dig feel about them that they’re interesting rather than disturbing; a coffee- or end table decorated like this would be an amazing accent piece in an otherwise mainstream room. Lovely!

Shanty2Chic is the work of two sisters who delight in taking cheap items and transforming them into lovely home décor. They have all kinds of great ideas for little projects, and since they tend to do things with dark wood and metal their style definitely has a gothy vibe.

Some of my favorites include the apothecary jars made of wooden candlesticks and glass canisters, some spruced-up white pumpkins made with cheap faux pumpkins and twine, a magnet board with wonderful vintage-looking letters, and some revamped candlesticks (even the “before”–which one of the sisters also did–is great).

If you’re looking for inexpensive ways to add a lot of personal style to your home, definitely check out this blog. It’s amazing how much you can do with a little paint and some imagination.

You’ve probably seen the all-coffin kitchen and other themed furniture made by Coffin It Up. It probably comes as no surprise that the proprietors’ own house is also coffin-themed.

Bryan and Dusty Schoening have a year-round cemetery at their house, complete with a coffin-shaped gazebo where they host several weddings every year.

HGTV has a short home tour of their exterior, plus some photos of the famous coffin kitchen that they did for a client. I’m very much taken with the columns on their front porch.

Check out this awesome ouija board dining table over at CraftyGoths. The artist sanded the top of a wooden table, stained the edges, and hand-painted(!) all of the symbols. It’s just gorgeous.

I’d never be able to manage the hand-painting bit,* and some of the drawings are a little too finely-detailed to do with stencils, but I bet a similar effect could be accomplished by printing out the symbols and then decoupaging them to the tabletop. Seal it with several coats of spar varnish and it should hold up just fine.

The artist says she plans to put a lazy susan shaped like a planchette in the middle of the table, which is additional brilliance.

One of the post commenters says that she did a similar ouija board on her bathroom counter (no details on what materials she used), and you could do one on a smaller side table or desk, too. It’s elegant and creepy at the same time. I love it.

*I have the artistic talent of Rembrandt. If he were hogtied and stuffed in a sack of live weasels.

When the Shadow Family attended the county fair a few weeks ago, I snapped this photo in the Home Arts exhibit (click to enlarge): It’s a spooky little scene set inside a real egg.

Decorating eggs like this is easier than you probably think it is: Certainly, you have to be more careful with a real eggshell than with a plastic one, but the shells are actually pretty sturdy and can be decorated with a huge variety of techniques. (Plus there’s a kind of satisfying ship-in-a-bottle aspect to working with something that seems so impossibly fragile.)

Working with real eggs is a popular hobby, and there are lots of resources for both techniques and materials. You can experiment with chicken eggs and then move up to the eggs of more exotic species. The next time you need eggs for a cake or want scrambled eggs for breakfast, blow them out instead of cracking them:

1. Bring the egg to room temperature (it’s harder to blow out a cold egg).
2. Take a large (clean) sewing needle and poke a hole in one end of the shell, then poke a hole in the other end and wiggle the needle around a little to enlarge the hole. Make sure you also puncture the yolk.
3. Hold the egg over a bowl and blow gently in the small hole. The egg’s guts should run out of the larger hole. (Be prepared for the occasional broken egg.)
4. Rinse out the egg and then place in an egg carton with the large hole down so that the water and any leftover egg bits can drain out.

You can paint or decoupage the eggs (Martha Stewart has an article on decoupaged eggs here), cover them with beads, use a dremel tool to cut shapes, and much else. Some resources to get you started are here, here, and here).

The egg shown above, incidentally, has had doors cut in it with a dremel tool and then reattached using little hinges made for that purpose (the stand it’s sitting on is purpose-made too; as I said, egg decorating is a popular hobby). It might be a painted goose egg or may be an emu egg, which are naturally black. The interior is painted and decorated with miniatures, just like a diorama.

Don’t limit your scary-egg activities to springtime (although a few eggs painted like skulls will certainly enliven an Easter egg hunt). A basket of spookily-decoupaged eggs or a showpiece egg like the one above is a lovely decorative accent year-round.

You know those “virtual fireplace” videos? This is like that, only weirder.

Twisted Ambience offers DVDs that turn your TV into a “Dead Sea” aquarium (with skeletal fish), display strange specimens preserved in virtual formaldehyde, or feature possessed paintings, animated jack-o’-lanterns, and unquiet graves.

This would be a great background decoration for a party, or just to add a little atmosphere at any time. I’m terribly disappointed that there isn’t a computer screensaver version of the dead aquarium.

(Hat tip to Fiend4Halloween)

Reader DampViolets sent me links to a couple of hanging tapestries on Art.com (Hallows Panel, Halloween Scroll), which are absolutely lovely. I also clicked out to their main Halloween section, and they’ve got all kinds of pretty things to hang on your walls.

They’ve got some nice historical prints like this and this, vintage reproductions like this, and plenty of other posters, prints, and banners (I think this would be an attractive addition to a child’s bedroom).

Some of them are fine art-quality and commensurately expensive, but many are quite reasonable and would be just the thing to add a little gloom to your room. Go look!