When I was a kid, my neighbours and I would dress up and go around the neighbourhood trick-or-treating. Halloween has never been really big in the UK but we always loved to celebrate it. For whatever reason, it seems to have died down now and I rarely see anyone celebrate it here. But it’s a great holiday that I remember loving when I was younger so I thought it was worth talking about. For those who don’t know, it’s coming up this Saturday so I thought I’d dedicate a quick post to it today – as next week’s post is probably way too late! Hopefully something will inspire you to celebrate Halloween in your own little way, whichever country you’re in! So here’s to Halloween, let’s make it a scary one (or perhaps one filled with lots of candy and cuteness).
As we don’t have anyone in the area that does trick-or-treating anymore, it seemed like a waste to decorate the house for this season and I couldn’t make many cards as no one I know actually celebrates it either! However, what I could do is something for me. I choose to decorate this week’s spread in my planner with a few Halloween themed bits and bobs.
This is the Mambi Happy Planner that I have recently started to use. I am, by no means, an expert in decorating planners as this is actually my first month of ever doing it but I’m really enjoying experimenting with different things and getting into it. Here, I am using watercolours, sticky notes, scrapbook paper, stamps and a bunch of stickers too. I love adding a pop of colour with watercolours (for this spread, I used the Tim Holtz Distress Markers) and I couldn’t resist watercolouring that super cute little dragon up there on the left hand side now… The Dragon fellow and his egg shell are from the Dragon stamp set by Sweet Stamp Shop. The witch sticker, birthday banner, weekend banner, hydrate stickers, sticker to do box and “It’s Halloween” stickers are all from The Geeky Planner. I combined these with some purple sticky notes I had lying around, strips of glitter paper and a variety of scrapbook papers. But mostly, I loved creating the little pandas and repurposing some of my super cute stamps for Halloween!
These little monsters were created from a very cute stamp set by Mama Elephant called Pandamonium and I also made a few penguins from the set Arctic Penguins. Both of these will probably feature in my Christmas cards soon as they are so stinking cute. For this spread, though, I decided to spruce them up into something a bit more… dead? I gave them weird eyes, scars, dead patches, whatever I could think of. The zombie penguins came alive with their weird eyes, some scars and one even has some brains coming out (though it’s a bit hard to see on the dark background). My favourite is the zombie panda that is coming out of the ground. There’s even a Frankenstein inspired panda. I created these eight little creatures by just playing around with some stamp sets that I have but you could definitely create way more. I’m not currently using the penguins anywhere so I may chuck them onto my monthly spread for October.
In other news, I have also been dabbling a bit with other (more Halloween themed) stamp sets recently… The Cobweb Blueprint by Tim Holtz featured on my Instagram as I was experimenting with some Halloween card designs for it. This spiderweb could be stamped directly onto your planner spread too, if you don’t want to make cards with it. 
The Monster Mash stamp set by Lawn Fawn is one that I love playing around with. If I celebrated Halloween, I would definitely make some goodie bags full of sweets to give out and use these little monsters to create quick and easy tags for the bags. The set comes with great little messages like “eye think you’re neat” or “have a boo-tiful day” and quite honestly, I use this for many occasions outside of Halloween but the fact that they are monsters makes it a great Halloween set too!
Please let me know what you think and Happy Halloween to everyone in advance! Make sure you stock up on candy – cause that is (and always was) definitely my favourite part!
These are the supplies I mentioned:
- Tim Holtz – Distress Markers & Cobweb Blueprint
- Sweet Stamp Shop – Dragon (US)
- Mama Elephant – Pandamonium & Arctic Penguins (US)
- Lawn Fawn – Monster Mash (US)
- Mambi – Happy Planner
- The Geeky Planner – Stickers