Sweet Sugar Skulls

As I'm a bit skull crazy at the moment, and Halloween and The Mexican Day of the Dead festivities are just around the corner, I thought it was high time I did a feature on fancy decorated Skulls.
First up is the colourful and detailed felt and wire skulls from RawBone Studio's Halloween and Day of the Dead folk art shop! Robin's whimsical and playful decor is perfect for your own altar of the dead or spooky October home. Robin loves primitive, naive and colorful folk art with a little humor slipped in. And where did the name RawBone come from? According to Robin " my nickname is Rawbone... and it stuck."

RawBone's fancy skull garlands.

plush skulls and brooches,

and these fantastic bent wire skulls. Love these!!

There are also some clever recycled sardine can skulls in the RawBone Shop made by an artist high on omega3 fish oil. Why? Because Joe (Robin's friend and schoolmate who’s art she adores) had to eat all the sardines to get the can!As a special treat there will be one of these most excellent tin can skulls up for grabs to one lucky commenter. But wait...there's more giveaways to come!

Next up are the craftiest gals in town...the Sister Outlaws and a selection of their cool sugar skull kits. They have very fancy and decorative sugar skull bag tag kits available to buy full of buttons, doily bits, lace, ric rac and felt, not to mention a pattern, instructions and a needle and yarn. And just about to be released are the sugar skull coin purse kits. How cool are these!
Re-Sew- Cool! And we are lucky enough to have a kit to giveaway. So that's two great giveaways so far.

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And finally, because it's my blog and I'm feeling all inspired by these generous giveaways, I am throwing in a Betty Jo skull brooch as a final giveaway item.So just leave a comment if you want to be in the running. I will choose three winners.
The giveaway will run till November the 1st....when the official Day of the Dead festivities begin.
Good luck and tell your friends!

Snail Mail

After much consideration and tireless research*, I declare SNAILS to be the new critter trend for 2011. I can back this prediction up with these cute and clever snail goodies I've found poking their heads out of their shells around craftyland.Jodie from RicRac's cheeky racing snail made from recycled jumpers. Tutorial here.

This amazing snail shaped ukulele is hand made to order. And check out the other cool ukuleles in this very talented craftsmans shop.
Cute amigurumi garden snail by Hansi Singh Snail hand Shadow t-shirt by Zazzle
Shelby Lino Snail

*Research based on the fact that I was asked to make a snail brooch and figured that is a good enough reason for them to be trendy......and foxes are so last week!