Mortem\’s Tricks or Treats: Sharpie Marker Jack O\’ Lanterns.

I’ve wanted to write for so long, even had a nostalgic conversation about our blogs with Mrs Insomniac during my latest visit home North. Sufficed to say, it’s been a community that I (we) have missed dearly, and seeing the efforts of some of the Ladies in Black continue despite dwindling traffic, well it’s inspired me greatly.I would like to get back to writing, even if its on a much more limited basis, say like once a month! I think it’s about time to re-break the ice that has been turning into ancient glaciers on this blog.BWO will be temporarily disregarded as I thaw the frost from my brain, hehe. I encourage all my fellow bloggers, who like me stopped blogging, to pick up the keyboard and write– even if it’s a simple personal update that’s no more than a paragraph… something to shift the ice!To kick off, I have decided to recycle a mini DIY that I posted to my IG account a couple weeks ago…Clearly I didn’t/don’t know what to write about, but it helps to get the juices flowing and since my life has been revolving around Strange Coven and getting it established enough to take off with, I decided not to write about that…Not yet anyway…Ironically though, this DIY was done because I started vending this year for the first time in over a decade and during my search for things to use for display and decorations, I stumbled upon these plain ceramic pumpkin photo holders on clearance for 85 cents a piece.I figured they’d hold my signs just dandy but they weren’t “spooky” enough to fit perfectly into my booth display. So in true fashion… I spookified them.

Ceramic Pumpkin Photo Holders Updo

You’ll need:Ceramic photo holder– pumpkins in my caseNormal sharpie penOil based sharpie penConvection oven

When I saw them, I remembered the DIY project trending a year or so ago on Pinterest: sharpie mug art– this would be the culprit that sealed this little deal for me.I took an ordinary sharpie (the same color as your oil based one or the colors begin to mix) and free-handed a couple of my favorite jack o’ lantern faces; I went over with a plain sharpie first because it’s easy to rub off mistakes that might’ve happened with some rubbing alcohol. The oil based takes a bit of scrubbing but can and does come off with rubbing alcohol in any case.

Once I was happy with all the lines, I simply went over and filled with an oil based sharpie.Put them on a pan, baked in a convection oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 mins constantly checking to see that it didn’t scorch/bubble the marker paint and/or crack the ceramic.Let cool and viola!You would need a little stronger solvent to remove the drawings from this point.Things to note: imagine my disappointment when discovering that an oil based pen is a push-nib reservoir kind of pen, these are notorious for over flowing the felt nibs and creating puddles everywhere… which it did for me because it wasn’t flowing out for the first several pumps and I was really unaware of the low viscosity of the actual paint/ink. These types of pens were probably invented by the anti-craft himself.Since I don’t need to display signs anymore, I use them now to display some of my favorite die-cuts from Micheal’s I got this past Halloween, as seen in the first photo.But be warned, this is awful addictive once you realize you don’t need to zentangle to doodle on ceramics and glass objects with sharpies.