Trick or Treat!

Hooray! Now that our big annual Halloween party is over, I'm so excited that I can actually share our decor with you all! We try to keep everything a surprise for our guests, so I didn't want to reveal anything until after it was over.

First of all, I'm was super excited about my costume, and it was probably one of the easiest ones I've ever come up with. I went as Abby from NCIS. If you don't know who I'm talking about, you really should watch the show. Personally, I think I nailed it. I even had the Caf-Pow cup.

Here I am with the lovely Shelby

Of course, the hair took me two tries and I ended up going with the permanent color, so it looks like I'll be rocking the raven haired look for awhile.

I didn't get pictures of everything (some of the lighting effects don't photograph well, like the floating candles, but I'll try to do a tutorial on those sometime), but here are a few of the highlights:

 Here is the wreath I made. Will definitely do a tutorial on this one, it was so easy and I think it looks fantastic.

In the bathroom, I sank some plastic bones in the water and added floating candles. Last year I dyed the water red. This clearly does not look quite so impressive in the bright light as it does by candle light. We also had flickering bulbs in the vanity lights, so as not to ruin the atmosphere.

I found this sweet framed negative at an antique store and knew I had to have it. I replaced one of the bathroom pictures with this. In the candle light it added a creepy touch.

In the backyard, on the other side of our fire pit, we set up the graveyard. We made all the tombstones ourselves a few years ago. It went in the backyard this year because the first year I had it set up, someone stole my two favorite tombstones and it broke my heart. Now the neighborhood hooligans don't even know its there.

And this is the pièce de résistance:

Out 7 ft. tall Jack Skellington. Sweet, right? He was a huge pain in the butt to make, but I think we can all agree that the end result was worth it. No tutorial on this guy, I didn't take any pictures of the process and it was, like I said, a huge pain to make.

Tomorrow, I'll show you a few of my other decorating tips and have a quick, easy and dirty cheap lighting tutorial!