Halloween (and Day of the Dead) miscellany

I rarely talk much here about anything outside the nails/makeup/skincare realm, but today I'm going to talk a bit about Halloween junk, because I keep on collecting it though I know I really ought to stop:

These were written up on Nerdist (at least I think so, I haven't actually been able to find the piece again) and so I bought a couple on Amazon (where they are still available as I write this). I have a banner that I was thinking this might be useful for, but that didn't work out. I currently am not using them for anything actually useful, but I did put them in places where we could see them, so at least we're enjoying their goofy charm. I mean, bat clothespins! How can you beat that?


Here is the banner in question. I didn't want to put another nail in the wall since this is just temporary, so I tied it to the calendar on one end and then held up the rest with washi tape:

I bought the sugar-skull banner at the grocery store for $3. The grocery store in question is H-E-B, which is San-Antonio-based and thus is always one of the best places around to buy assorted Day of the Dead stuff. (I also bought a couple more items on that page, which I had actually forgotten about already - a melamine plate and one of the pet-skeleton grocery bags. I actually have a whole collection of that melamine-ware in various designs.) Also you might recognize the sugar skulls, since I used them for backgrounds in several pictures before I got around to hanging up the banner.

Rob did manage to knock up against the calendar one night and halfway knock the whole banner down, but we got it all back up again and the washi tape actually seems to be holding fine. It's light.

Speaking of washi tape, I ordered a bunch from Etsy, not all of which is related to  holidays but you get to see all of it anyway:

The bottom three could be construed to be Halloween/DotD-related, right? - since purple seems to have become an unofficial Halloween color these days. There is purple tape holding up the banner above if you look close. (What I mean is that the "expanded" Halloween palette that you see around the most is black/orange/lime/purple. I would never come up with that combination on my own, but I quite like it.)

The reason I try to stop myself from buying Halloween stuff is because I tend to throw it in a box and forget about it the next year. It just doesn't seem to get reused as much as I think it ought to. Although I did remember to pull out the light-up eyeball wreath that I bought at Target last year.