Orange Orchids & a Halloween shirt

Guilty as charged: I love Halloween more than I love Christmas. I used to be dazzled equally by both. I adored the lights, the glitter, the rich mythology. Both are consumer frenzies, but I hold that less against Halloween than I do Christmas.

Not so much the fault of Christmas. It’s been hijacked by both ultra-conservative and ultra-capitalist forces, and the underlying fun has been shadowed…for me. At some point I might fall back in love with it.

Halloween? I have no problem with its glitz, I’m familiar with the Samhain stories from which it evolved, and no treacly-pure ‘harvest festival’ will take its place in my esteem.

Here are two fun pieces that will help me celebrate the season in years to come (MileHighCon 2018, I’m eyeing you.)

Orange Orchids is a long 32″ beadwoven necklace I started a little over a year ago, with vague ideas of weaving it into a lighted strand of ED orange pumpkins. Yeah, no, engineering and physics said otherwise. But the necklace alone is wearable, and I’ll be adding more vines and flowers to it to make it even longer.

Everyone needs a good Halloween shirt, and I lucked out with this one at my local Kroger’s on sale. I usually don’t bother with thin synthetic knit garments, but the design on this one was so killer I had to have it.

However, by the time I actually wear it, it will almost certainly have more beads.