So early it's scary!

Holidays have a way of sneaking up on me. I love them in theory, but in practice I am all too often caught unawares by the calendar. But last year I actually planned ahead for Halloween and began sewing my son's costume in September. Good thing--I finished appliqueing the stripes on his tiger costume at about 2 AM the morning before he needed to wear it.

Photo © 2008 David Mandel / Ampersand Industries
(He looks in this picture the way I felt at the end of that project.)

In a funny way, that costume was the catalyst for me starting this blog. I had spent so much time imagining and testing and crafting the costume that I wanted some way to document it for posterity. Of course, I didn't get around to starting the blog until November, so that impulse only got me so far, and I never posted about the costume. My excuse is that all the fuzz from that *&@#! fleece was clogging my brain. Plus I was still really tired from sewing all those things that weren't rectangles together.

But back to the present and this Halloween. I never really cared much about Halloween until I had a child, but now it's something I really look forward to--and actually have the presence of mind to see coming on the horizon...sort of. By coming on the horizon, I mean that when I sewed the costume last year, I made it 3 inches too long so he could wear it again this year. Brilliant, no?

A few weeks ago I was jolted into the holiday season by a custom design order for a CHRISTMAS card. People? It is still 80 degrees here! Christmas? And yet, this is apparently what normal people do. It is called planning ahead. Weird.

The order came from my new blog friend, Kate. She and her husband are spending a year in Paris while he apprentices in several restaurants. Dreamy, no? You really should check her blog out--if Paris isn't enough for you, she also has written this sentence: "I have of course found interesting ways to avoid the actual business of packing, not least among them a renewed love of the sartorial arts." Done. Anyhoo, Kate wanted to send a special Christmas card from Paris this year to all of her friends and family back home in the states. We came up with a twist on old-fashioned striped air mail envelopes, and a snappy little Eiffel Tower Christmas tree. Wanna See?

Fast-forward. I am lately having insomnia on a nightly basis, which is a good time to think about spooky things. One 3AM last week, I was rifling through the eleventy billion open Illustrator windows on my computer, and I landed back on Kate's Christmas postcard; I was inspired by the darkness all around to whip up a little Halloween printable postcard/invitation based on the air mail idea--scare mail! Get it? Air mail, scare mail? I kill me. Anyway, at this point I've probably maxed out my capacity for planning ahead, and I don't think I'm going to have the wherewithall to throw a Halloween party myself, so I did a plain postcard version, too. Both are linked below.

Illustration and design © 2009 Cameron Blazer / Cottage Industrialist

Download the card front here.
Download the invitation back here.
Download the plain back here.

A couple of printing notes: First, I know that's a lot of black ink, so I made it a dark grey, rather than a full black to try to conserve--just plan accordingly. Second, I broke with my usual practice of leaving .25 inch margins on everything, and instead I designed this to print to the edge of an 8.5x11" page. If your printer can't do borderless printing, you can reduce the size (for most printers 92% is the magic number), and you'll just have to trim the edges off. Be sure if you do it this way, that you tell your printer to center the image, or else your fronts might not line up with your backs!

As usual, these freebies are for personal use only, and if linking, please provide a link to the post, not just the downloads.

P.S. In the meantime, le kid has informed me that he is not going to be a tiger this year, but a fireman. Expect the sleepless nights to continue.

Update on Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 5:46AM by Cameron Blazer

I just had a thought--if you are one of those plan-ahead types who has already made/assembled/purchased your kid's Halloween costume, instead of my design, you could print a cute picture of your kid in the costume on the front of the postcard and send to friends and family with the "scare mail" back.