Never too soon for Halloween

It seems like every year goodies for certain holidays start showing up sooner and sooner. I know that this can make many people roll their eyes, but not me. I love the first signs of Halloween goods popping up in stores, because that means fall is upon us. This for me starts the most magical time of the year. We start with Halloween, all the adorable costumes, and all the spooky movies. So it should not come as any surprise that my cards for this week are Halloween themed.

I picked up MFT Stamps Witch Way Is The Candy by Birdie Brown a couple of years back and did nothing with it until this year. Honestly, I used to have a job where I was on call 24/7 so as much as I love crafting, I never have time for it. These days though I have a set schedule and much more time to do what I LOVE!

This week I made two Shaker Cards using Witch Way Is The Candy.

My first shaker was easy enough to make. I used Stampin' Up!'s Summer Sun Cardstock for the frame and base of the card because I thought it went really well with the patterned paper from my stash. I die cut some clouds out of white cardstock using Lawn Fawn's Puffy Clouds Border Die and inked it up with some black soot Distress Ink. I threw in some Doodlebug Sequins and BAM, shaker was done.

I didn't run into any issues until I went to color that precious witch. My hubby recently surprised me with a full core set of the Spectrum Noir alcohol markers. While they are similar to Copics, they don't blend quite the same as Copics do. There's definitely a learning curve to them, but they are great markers and a truly sweet gift from a fantastic hubby!

My second card using that cutie put up a little more of a fight.I knew I wanted to put a shaker tag onto a card front and started working on the tag first. My first tag ended in Utter Disaster. I am not saying this to be dramatic, my first tag warped, my sequins fell out due to the warping, it was not pretty. The only thing I managed to salvage from that first tag was the sequins.

Creating my second tag went much smoother than the first. The sentiment is embossed onto black card stock and comes from the HSH Halloween Additions set by  There She Goes. I used some patterned paper from my stash for the background of the tag and sponged some Spiced Marmalade Distress Oxide Ink onto some white paper and die cut it out for the top of my tag. I finished the tag off with some Lawn Fawn Gold Sparkle Cord, black ribbon, and some gold Pretty Pink Posh sequins.

My tag ended up just a little bigger than I originally intended so I made a 5x7 card base out of Canson watercolor paper. I used my Kuretake Gansai Tambi to watercolor the base with black and gold and put it all together.

My question to y'all is, are excited to see Halloween stuff already or do you wish they would wait until closer to the actual holiday?

Until next time, keep on craftin'!