avant-garde pumpkins

My mom, niece, nephew and I carved pumpkins this weekend and got a little mixed-media on their gourds.

halloween improvising

Okay, so maybe a group of us being the Chilean miners for Halloween was not a unique idea this year. But the cries of Chi! Chi! Chi! Le! Le! Le! were so worth it. As was the comfort factor (a big, one-piece white painter’s suit), which was sublime.

We came up one hardhat short, so we improvised with a colander, a baseball hat, foam core to round out the brim, election mailers folded into ridges, and duct tape. Done.

tempting the occult?

No offense to Tarot believers, but these are some pretty menacing graphics that you use to read my soul.

We’re still shaping our Halloween party ideas, and this year I’m feeling a strong pull toward the macabre. I picked up a deck of Tarot cards in my favorite bookstore the other day, where they were kept under lock and key. They had to page someone to come open the case, and when the very square-looking bibliophile showed up with the keys, I tried my best Wiccan eye glower.

It didn’t work.

So I fessed up that I was going to use these cards as decoration, and he totally got into helping me find the ones with the most ominous illustrations. Oh look, here's a really creepy dude!

I’m not done with the cards yet, but here’s the first project. I hauled some fallen branches out of the park, spray painted them a glossy black, and then hung feathers and the most spooky cards among the dark branches.

So if crows swoop out of the sky and witches put a hex on my house, I don't know if I can plead ignorance.