Halloween Party & Fall Garden

 

C'mon in if you dare!

 

Welcome back to Boxwood Cottage dear friends and readers!

Today I'd like to show you the pictures from our little Halloween party and of course the promised Fall garden photos, but let's start with Halloween:

I had the cottage all decked out for Halloween the night before Halloween on Halloween eve and took some pictures to share with you. Unfortunately Halloween is no holiday here ( it is in some states of Germany though called "Reformation day" and the first of November lot's of German states with mostly catholics have another holiday called "All Saints" but we poor people here in Bremen got none of these holidays *sobs*) and so I had to work the whole day and therefore didn't get around to post these earlier.

The table is set and ready for our little Halloween party with my daughter, niece and nephews and friends of them. We do this together for some years now and the kids always love my decorations so of course I love to craft things for Halloween and decorate for them.

We don't like it too spooky though, but still my daughter had fun mixing some poison green....

as well as poison blue and blood red drinks for the party. Everyone tried the red and blue stuff but for some reason nobody dared to try the green frog gall drink he he. I don't know why, it's only Vanilla soy milk mixed with green Matcha tea he he ;-)

I also love to decorate my mantle for all seasons so Halloween is no exception:

The silver Dresden foil letters which I glued to the black paper cone spell "All Hallows Eve!

I also framed some spooky pictures from Karen's Graphics Fairy blog and printed out the skelletons and top hats (I'm a huge top hat lover as most of you may know by now) from Karen's DIY blog, glued them together and hung them on the felt ball garland which I made last month.

Further I cutted out a couple of bats from black cardboard and embellished some papier maché houses. The "Haunted House" in the middle is a white cardboard house with a battery light inside which I found at IKEA during my last visit there. I painted the roof with black chalkboard paint, added the silver Dresden letters as well as some polkadotted black washi tape and a black ric rac border etc.. Then I made a tiny white felt pumpkin and a ghost from a white Christmas ball glass ornament and a bit of cotton batting. The white and black card board houses have the house numbers (wooden bingo numbers) 31 and 13! Spooky isn't it ? ;-)

I was lucky to have found a couple of white glittered bottle brush trees in tiny pots in our local hardware and home improvement store called Toom and added them to the scene aka my Halloween village. The black one I had already before. I really like how the village looks at night with only the candles lit.

Before I decorated the village on top of the mantle, I had a little photo shoot with the "gentlemen treat ghosts" that I made for the kids. I used peat pots, black paint, white paint, papier maché egg boxes, little black top hats, silver pipe cleaners etc.pp to make them and had so much fun! What do you think, do you like them? Luckily the kids did! :)

Of course you can take the skelleton heads aka the egg boxes out and open them. I filled them with yummy treats for the kids. 

The white papier maché mask that you see in the next photo I found in our local craft market and just had to have it. I think it looks great over the white pumpkin, wouldn't you agree with me?

 

My daughter who loves to bake and cook (lucky me!) baked the ghost pumpkin cookies and I captivated them in this glass jar:

Oh and of course we had friendly ghosts and bats everywhere around the living room:

Wanna see my party guests? Here is the gang:

My nephew who is a cool teenager of couse went as Joker:

He even got the mask from his enemy batman EEK! My niece is a Vampire girl, what else ;-)

The kids had fun playing "Batman and Joker":

and I'm sure they will love to find their pictures here on my blog!:)

Here is me (sporting my white mask) with the girls:

Well now Halloween is all over again for another year, but before I start to craft and decorate for Christmas, to which I'm really looking forward too btw, I'd like to share with you some garden pictures which I took in October. Actually only less than two weeks ago we had a lovely warm and golden weekend with Summer like temperatures over +22 °C again and then suddenly last weekend the first frost came with temps under minus -4°C which was quite a shock, because I wasn't ready for it yet. I took all these photos in the week before the first frost though:

The grapevine over my living room window and around my deck was ripe and tasted very sweet. This is the view I had when looking out of my living room window over the deck into the garden:

See all the flowers still in bloom? Zooming in a bit closer for you:

If you are a regular follower/reader of my blog you may have noticed that suddenly you can see my garden tool house in the back of my garden. The one with the two round windows:

I think I told you before that we removed a lot of high cherry laurel busches last month at the end of my garden. They were growing behind the maple tree and blocking the view, but now that they are removed I'm glad that I can see my garden house again and I also gained back lot's of garden space for a better use. I have lot's of plans for that area which I hope to realize until Spring well at last until next Summer.

Here's a close up of my decorated garden tables. I love the decorative cabbage in the wooden box:

and closer:

Anual Summer flowers still bloomed beautifully too before last weekends first frost came:

A closer view over the flowers on my deck down to the garden tool house in the back of my yard:

White Dahlias and pink Snapdragons were still blooming so prettily together and attracting the bumble bees:

And also the pink Echinacea was still in bloom:

Oh well all this beauty is gone again now just one week later. Last Sunday the clock/time was changed an hour back here and now it is already dark outside when I come home from work.

One more picture I'd like to share with you is this one which I called "Nature beeswax collage":

I had such fun playing with the clarified white beeswax and found nature elements in my sisters art studio during my Fall vacation in the first week of October and coming home I gathered all the pieces and clipped them on one of my skirt hangers.

Well now since October and Halloween are past and over again

let's say bye bye to them and hello cosy winter time!

xoxo~ Carola

P.S. Geez this was a long post again, I never seem to get around doing just several short posts. Oh well but I hope you don't mind and that I'll see y'all again for a Christmassy post in November.

Until then Happy November everyone!

Black & White Fall~Halloween decor & Kitchen glimpses

Welcome back to Boxwood Cottage dear readers and blogging friends! I hope that you can still remember me, although I haven't got around to post on my blog for over 7 weeks again. To make up for it I brought lot's of photos to share with you today. Summer was quite busy around here. We did some major changes in the garden and in the kitchen, sold our old car, bought a newer one and so on. All things that took more time than I expected, but I also had to work all Summer long. My last vacation was in May, so for that I think that we accomplished quite a few things. My daughter was a great help with the kitchen renovating and she's always doing the cooking lately, but more about the kitchen things later in this post. Today I'd like to start with my black & white fall decorating which is already going over into Halloween decorating by now.

It's still hard to believe for me that a couple of years ago I didn't even like Halloween but at that time I still thought that it always has to have to do with lot's of the color Orange, which I'm not so kean on, but since ca. 4 years ago I discovered white pumpkins here in Germany too which I love and so I started to love decorating for Halloween too ;)

They are still not that easy to find though, at least here in the Bremen area and that's why I started by painting orange Hokaido pumpkins white, back in August already lol and I had an orange clay pumpkin which I painted black. But then at the beginning of September I found some white Lumina pumpkins at a pumpkin farm and around 3 weeks ago I was finally lucky enough to also find the little Baby boos which are my favorites and so very hard to come by here.

I also love crafting for Halloween. I embellished and collaged the black BOO box and the Halloween book in the picture above for example and painted the once very colorful mask, which I brought home from a vacation to Venetia a few years ago, black with the matt black chalkboard paint that I so like to use.

I had fun shooting the black feather crows and ravens, which were posing for me on several pumpkins. Mr. Crow is quite a dapper btw and loves to wear his top hat!

and from another angle:

Isn't Mr. Crow just too cute the way he's peeking over the pumpkins?

Do you love the baby boos as much as I do?

For the mantle I made a black and white felt pompon garland and a black wooden boo sign with silver glittered letters:

Let's have a closer look at the mantle:

The pumpkin in the middle is the Hokaido which I painted white and embellished it with velvet leaves, some wire spirals and a printed 31 sign.

I further made a black cardboard witch hat for the faux cream colered pumpkin that my daughter bought for me when she studied in Buffalo N.Y. almost two years ago:

And I also made the black cardboard mask with nose for the big pumpkin:

I think I never showed you my Adler sewing machine table since I painted it white:

Mrs. Raven loves to sit on top of the vintage black camera (a gift from a friend) and was happy to get her picture taken:

In the next photo you can see close up of the clay pumpkin which I painted black:

On the white and rusty garden urn sit's another lumina pumpkin which also got a round printed 31 paper tag with faux stitches and of course one of the ravens thinks that it is a fabulous spot to sit on and get photographed:

I love that it looks as if the pumpkin had taken over the rust of the urn, can you see what I mean in the shoot below?

Well now I think it's enough of my black & white Fall and Halloween decor for today and I can show you a glimpse of my freshly painted kitchen. It is not easy to photograph because it's just a small space and we are not really finished with it yet.

We did not only sanded and painted all the Ikea beech wood cabinet doors and drawers but also removed the fume exatractor hood and added 4 big wipeable melamine resin tiles instead wich gave us more space and we never used the fume extractor hood anyway and I didn't really like the look of so much alumium anymore.

Although I quite like the black & white look I still would love to get a new wooden counter top one day and of course I still dream of a white porcelain farmhouse sink but these kind of things I cannot do alone or with the help of my daughter so they still have to wait.

I know I mentioned already here on my blog that we eat only vegan food and since this involves a lot of fresh cooking our kitchen is quite important to us and in daily use and the new look of it also gave us the power for a new step or better said level in vegan cooking. Until some days ago we only had american vegan cook books, which are good, but also most of the recipes are quite complicated and require lot's of different pots and pans to cook. My daughter who is doing a lot of online research on this matter purchased the latest book of Attila Hildmann last week and this is a very good vegan cook book with easy and still very delicious and healthy recipes written in German language since he is a German cook and with brilliant photos:

Since this book is called "Vegan for fit" (his other great cook book is called "Vegan for fun") it means that you will lose weight and feel fitter and healthier when you cook by following his tips and recipes by still having 3 delicous meals a day and that is what we ultimately wish for. This also means no more pasta for us for at least 30 days. We love eating pasta dishes but the recipes in this book are making it easy for us to quit because they are so delicious, healthy and nourishing. We are doing it for 5 days now and I would already recommend it. One advantage we have is that we already own a Vitamix blender which is needed for many of the recipes in this book and a Vitamix is not a cheap kitchen aid to buy. It costs around 600 Euro. We bought ours last Spring and never regretted it ever since. It is such a fabulous tool and you can make your own almond milk or almond butter or cashew ice cream and lot's of other fabulous yummy and healthy food with it.

Well to close this post I have another pumpkin picture for you but this time it is of my garden table with the greyish green Australian pumpkins that I purchased at the pumpkin fair we visited last Sunday:

I'll show you more photos of the autumnal garden and decor in my next post.
Until then I wish you all a 

Fabulous Fall!

xoxo~ Carola

Linking up with:
Knick of Time Tuesday
Vintage Inspiration  Friday 108 at Common Ground