Layout: Holy Halloween Costume Bat Girl

Hello.

It's very blustery and wet here and I walked about for the most part of the day with wet socks ... but enough about me, how are you? You hanging in there? Not been blown away yet?

Unless ofcourse you're in another hemisphere to me, in which case it's more like summer for you isn't it? And your socks are probably dry today.

But now allow me to further seasonally confuse me you even further as I share both the page I've got to share today and the story behind how it came to be.

A few months ago the lovely, hugely talented, Sharmaine Krujiver and I decided to have a little 'stash-swap' between us. So I put together a custom Plundered Pages pack, based on the topics and stories she blogs about at '4 Squirts and a Dollop of Cream', and posted it off to the Southern Hemisphere ....meanwhile this pretty parcel packed with goodies found itself on my [much colder] doormat as somethign of an early Christmas gift:

There were lots of lovely things inside, some of which I've already used [like the ticket, cabochon, vintage paper, button and envelope on this recent layout for example] and others which will be cropping up in my work until they've been used up!

And a few of them made their way on to today's page ... about Halloween [yes, I know it's the wrong season for this ... but I couldn't scrap Halloween photos until after Halloween could I?].

Anyway, here it is:

The large butterfly die-cut and the cabochons came from Sharmaine, a did the little cloud stickers.

I do accept that, in my doing fancy things to the contrast and colour in the above photo I have pretty much removed my nose thereby giving me more than a passing resemblance to a feminine Voldemort ... now let me move on to something equally as scary to some of you ...

Here I used butterlfy peel-offs [yes peel-offs and look - I lived to tell the tale!] as masks before inking over them which is one of my only current favourite uses for peel-offs. And similarly I heat embossed a few more butterflies as a resist before spritzing and using a brush to swipe spray ink across the page:

Here I created a little character from a tag, sticker, ticket and cabochon from Sharmaine and some ArtChix German Scrap wings and paper doll wellies from 3DJean.

And as for that costume ... well, it wasn't actually a costume ... it was just a regular dress I found on a rail in New Look! Not that I bought it for everday-wear you understand ... those days have gone [I haven't worn a dress that tight for a few years now ... and secretly I quite enjoyed it!] but I did buy it specifically for the Halloween party and not for a night out ... unlike some people:

And as for the title, well, my friend Kirsty and I often refer to each other as Bat Girl, [that sounded perfectly normal to me ... until I typed it out loud ...] so when I went to a Halloween party as a glamorous bat ... it seemed like a natural title choice!

So there we have it, seasonally a little late and sartorially a little questionable - but a lot of fun. And yes, I have kept the dress ... but I think it's going to be staying on the hanger until at least next Halloween!

OK ... I'll let you put your Christmas head back on now. See you soon.

Julie :-)