I found a cool looking skull book at Grimvisions and thought that my witch could use one. So instead of buying his(?), I decided to make my own.

For my first attempt, I decided to make the book out of cardboard and paper mache. It worked ok and looks good, but I think in the future I will use a real book so that I won't have the aggravation of paper mache.

The skull is just a foam skull (no jaw) that I bought at Wal-Mart. The candle is a real candle.

To tie it all together, I took some black, "blue stoneware", and white acrylic paint and colored everything to match.

The one part that I haven't done (but will), is add spider webs to give it an "untouched" look.

For our daughter's 6^th birthday, my wife came up with the idea to have a cake that looks like a pumpkin patch. Here's a picture of the end result.

I took longer to work on this than I had anticipated but she is finally complete! I also had time to build her a shelf to hold her potions, books, etc.

Here are some pics of the cauldron that I made out of an old clothes dryer drum: