Just call me Martha Stewart

Meet my new friend Mr. Glue Gun...

Well maybe friend is too strong of a word, but we've been spending a lot of time together lately. This may come as a shock to those of you who know me well since all of the artistic genes seemed to go to my sisters.

An alien recently (and briefly) took over my body as I was flipping through a few magazines and became inspired to make a Halloween wreath and costume for Grayson. Here are a few shots of the wreath which is basically a circle form wrapped in black duct tape with candy corn glued in alternating circles all over it.

The concept isn't complicated, but it did take quite a bit of patience and an eagle eye on the candy bags since my husband tends to consume candy corn at record speed.

As you know, Michael can be a bit OCD and his graphic design eye is quite critical, but the final product managed to win his approval and several compliments despite his unnatural distaste for wreathes.

Next I tackled the Halloween costume. I was going to buy a hilarious garden gnome costume from a Target mailer, but after finding an adorable and quite simple (i.e. no sewing required) goldfish costume in a magazine, I decided to pull out the glue gun once again and take my chances.

You can see the magazine version in the top left corner of the picture below. It originally called for using orange cupcake papers as the gills and then hot gluing them to an oversized orange hoodie and adding tall orange socks to complete the look. Seemed simple enough, but after not finding plain orange paper liners at any store in a 30-mile radius we came up with plan B.

While in Hobby Lobby, Michael had a brilliant idea to use the crinkle paper that teachers use for bulletin boards. We found some in the right shade of orange and we were in business. I still need to glue the eyes on the hood, but I think Grayson is going to make a pretty cute goldfish (and he'll stay warm too!).

Now I just need to sell Grayson on the goldfish idea. I've been working on it, but every time I ask him what he wants to be for Halloween his answer changes. First he was set on being a train (as in Thomas the Train); however I personally find Thomas a bit boring and didn't have the heart to purchase the costume.

Gray's latest desire is to be a hammer (thanks to the wooden tool puzzle he's currently obsessed with). I probably could have pulled that costume off somehow, but I had already put in lots of man hours searching for the goldfish materials so we were committed.

I'll post more pictures of our little goldfish once the transformation is complete. For now, I need to go rest my index finger because it's cramping up from all of the hot gluing.