Day Seven: Bats in my Belfry

A couple of years ago, I saw this really neat specimen box on tatertots and jello {via One Pretty Thing}. It was a shadowbox with bats punched from Halloween scrapbooking paper.

(Maybe all those people who think I have so much patience because I cross-stitch are right. Here I am waiting two years for me to get myself together to make these cute projects. No instant gratification here!) 


First I punched and laid out my bats. I don't have a lot of Halloween paper, so I stuck with an orange, purple, and green color palette--the new official color palette of Halloween. (Orange and black is so 1972.) (I made some visual puns, like the tiger bat in the lower left and the tropical fruit bat in the upper left. Okay just two, what more do you need from me?)

The elusive tiger bat.

Then I pinned my specimens to the board. Then I went and checked the tutorial that Jen had put together. It turns out I was doing it all wrong. So I just kept doing what I was doing. Because I liked the idea of really being able to see the pins. And I hated the idea of using a grid to lay them out. I figure if they look pretty much gridded to me, they're going to look pretty much gridded to you too without all that geometry. (Also, she bought a regular frame and made it into a specimen box. I spent $10 on a shadowbox with a padded fabric background. She saved $6 but I saved my sanity.)

Don't mind the one that turned upside down.

Then I closed the frame and by some miracle of vacuum-age, a lot of the bats fell right to the bottom of the frame. So I revisited Jen's tutorial and saw that she used dimensional adhesive. So I got out some pop dots and stuck the bats to the pins.

I can't wait for Halloween! 

**But wait, there's more!** Our "Flat Granny" is ready to move on. If you're interested in a visit, check out Jo's blog.

***Also*** the article about library stitching has appeared! Clickez. I'd like to point out there are things I would never say. "She's xx years young." My grandmother is 90 years old. My niece is twelve years old. I am 45 years old. What I said was, "Here, I'm the young one. I'm 45 but you don't have to print that." I also did not say "substitute grandmoms." I don't have a grandmom. I have grandmothers who are called Mimi and Ma. I said "surrogate grandmothers." The rest is fine. But seriously someone tells you you don't have to print their age so that's what you open with? Gah.