Today is the Dirty Dozen Alumni Gallery Challenge! Every 20th we have a new fun challenge for the Dirty Dozen Alumni to participate in, and this month I was excited to be asked by Jami to be the host! It was a lot of fun coming up with a challenge for October. I thought it would be fun to create a holiday themed challenge using one of my favorite embellishments: Googlie Eyes!! Then I had to be mean and think of something that would be a challenging restriction. When you think of Halloween, pumpkins are one of the first things that come to mind. Ah ha!! I had my challenge! No pumpkins AT ALL!

Well, I think everyone did an AWESOME job with this challenge and you can see them all here!!

The Challenge: Create a Halloween card or treat holder

Required Element: Googlie Eyes!

Restricted Element: No pumpkins!!!

So I’m thinking I kind of cheated with my project.

I ended up creating a Halloween door hanger to put on my boys’ bedroom door. (the door hanger is a blank from Bare Elements) It started with the kitty face that I created using punches and free-hand cutting the mouth. I added faux-stitching around the edges to give it the look of the vintage Halloween cats that I think are so cute. For the whiskers, I cut some orange wire, punched three holes, threaded the whiskers thru the holes and secured to the back with sticky tape.

I gave him a crooked smile then adhered the googlie eyes at a wonky angle, which I think makes him pretty charming!

I used my Cuttlebug with the Red Tag Sale dies. I cut them out of light weight coasters, then out of the Halloween paper and glued the paper letters onto the coaster letters. I find that this is easier for me, instead of adhering the paper to the coaster then cutting them with the die machine. I then inked the edges of the letters and the door hanger, piercing the orange designer paper before adhering it to the door hanger base. Buttons were inked, threaded and glued to the base. Then ribbons were added and embellished with a mini safety pin and orange bell.

My cheated comes from me not creating a card or treat holder. I originally intended to make a treat tag with the kitty face, but it evolved to a bigger project which I think my boys will enjoy hanging on their door knob. At least I didn’t use any pumpkins!! 😆