Alright folks, I’m back with Part II of the Halloween 2009 recap, so let’s get right to it!

Below is a picture of the dining room, where we served the desserts. Here’s a shot of the room before we had everything set up, but it shows off the overall look. Spooky, eh?

And here it is set up with all the food. We served ghostly cupcakes, candy corn trail mix, eyeball cake balls, skeleton pretzel rods, chocolates, pumpkin swirl brownies, and courtesy of my friend Jenn, carmel apples! The apothecary jars held spooky entrails.

Here are some of the apothecary jars up close I LOVED how these turned out.

And here’s the others.  FYI. I found these at Michaels. And if you don’t already know, at Michaels, almost every time you check out, you get a coupon, usually for 40% of one item (good for the next week). These apothecary jars ranged from $3.00 to $25.00, so I just spent a few weeks and bought one at a time using that coupon! They ended up being much more inexpensive than if I would have bought them all at once. The labels I just stuck on with rubber cement, and easily came off, so I can use them throughout the year for other decor purposes.

Here is one of the bookshelves. That little picture was a Halloween treat from my mom , and is so creepy! From one angle it looks like an old black and white picture of a little girl, from another angle she looks like a little demon. You can find the pictures at  The Ghoulish Gallery.

Here is the other bookshelf.

And there we have it…that concludes the 2009 Halloween tour! I can’t wait to share our invites with you tomorrow!

So I thought I’d kick off my Halloween ramp up by showing you a few photos of our house from last year…

Well, first of all, here’s me in my costume. My office dressed up as the cast from Mad Men.  Here’s me as Joan.

Here’s our mantel. Of course cobwebs were an essential part of the decor. I also used a lot of old black and white photos, candles of all shapes and sizes and lots of black, white, and red accessories to add to the eerie effect. I’ll tell you more about the accessories in the next few weeks!

Below is a pictures of our living room with the lights on. I bought a box full of white sheets for $4 each and we used them to cover all our furniture to give the house that haunted feeling. We replaced the curtains with creepier ones (which I’ll explain later), brought in some big oriental rugs, and my hubby built that coffin to replace our coffee table!

Here’s the same room at night. We didn’t use any of our overhead lighting at our party. We had two fires going in the backyard, we had had LOTS of candles, and my hubby bought a few under-cabinet lighting kits, and sprinkled those lights around the house to cast lots of eerie shadows. It turned out to be a REALLY cool effect!

Here’s another angle of the living room. We replaced a lot of the artwork in the house with aged mirrors, and creepy old photographs, but the artwork we did leave up, we hung askew, or in the case of our large wedding photo in the foyer (which is under glass, so don’t worry) we altered with red paint (that looked like blood). Across the painting I wrote “Turn back now!”.

My goal wasn’t to construct some crazy Halloween scenes, but instead was to create our normally lovely house as a haunted/uncared for house. I think we did a pretty darn good job, if I do say so myself! Stay tuned for Halloween 2009 Part II and preparations for Halloween 2010!!!