Scary Boo Boos

You learn from your mistakes, right? Well, I ought to be really smart by now. Here are some of my latest screw-ups and what I learned, or as I like to think of it, the good twin/bad twin post.

Case in point, the first bad twin.

It's getting close to Halloween and I decided I wanted to make a jack-o-lantern, so I found a cute stencil online, made myself a pattern, started folding and ended up with...... this hot mess.

Egad! Not at all what I was expecting. My cute little jack-o-lantern turned out like something from Friday the 13th only with a couple more teeth.

Hmmm...maybe, I thought, it would look more like a cute jack-o-lantern if I folded all the "non-face" parts away.

Well, that didn't work. What if I folded the extra pages into a circle of points instead, sorta like the outline of a pumpkin around the face?

Yikes, no! 

and so now he sits on a shelf in my attic looking something like this--Reader's Digest meets Frankenstein's monster meets the Lion King. (If someone makes that into a real movie, I call dibs on the royalties!)

I would feel sorry for him, if he weren't so darn...

I regrouped. Folding books, I told myself, is sorta like making an ice sculpture. You just chip/fold away the parts that don't look like your subject.

Aha! I suddenly realized that I had made the pumpkin face backward. It was as if I cut away all the pumpkin and just left orange where the eyes, nose and mouth were supposed to be. So I tried it again, only backwards this time, and got the good twin.

Now that's a little better. Next time I think I'll add a stem and then he'll be just about perfect.

And now... Bad twin #2 starring in I've got a case of the boos.

I decided that I hadn't made a word with really big letters in awhile, so I decided to go with Boo! I picked a font and started folding and got all the way to the end...

and the exclamation point was way to skinny to be seen, so I just tore it out. Now it's just Boo. I added ravens to the end papers to make it more scary because no one is going to be startled by just Boo. The bogeyman could come out from under the bed and say Boo Boo Boo as many time as he wanted and we would all just laugh, because we know exclamation points are important!!!!

Maybe I should just redo it with Mardi Gras paper for all my Louisiana friends.

"I love you, boo."

"I love you, too, boo."

But good twin to the rescue. I folded another and this time made the exclamation point nice and big and it turned out like this:

Scared you, didn't I! 

And then for good measure I picked a smaller, different font and did it again.

Sorry! I hope your heart can handle all this terror! (Oops, I just said terror on the Internet. Now I'm probably on the no-fly list.)

I can't decide which one is my favorite. The big letters are much deeper and you can see the dark text inside them which goes well with the glittery, black witches of the end papers. I think they give this Boo! a really ominous feeling, perfect for Halloween.

The smaller letters aren't folded as deep, so this Boo! has a much lighter, "five-year-olds trick-or-treating" vibe going on. 

So which one do you like best, boo?

#1                           or                         #2