©2006 review by Fiona Broome and the Hollow Hill Staff
Halloween: Imaginative Holiday Ideas
shines in a couple of areas.
You'll be inspired by six color pages of face painting designs. My favorite is the lovely "haunted castle"
face paint design, but I also like the artistic "spider web" face paint.
This book also features some unusual food ideas.
The "monster kebabs" are colorful and fun. They work as decorations and as snacks.
But, for truly creepy-looking food, it'd be difficult to surpass the Black pasta and calimari salad recipe.
If you
accented it with Red cabbage and orange sections salad, your guests will talk about your party every time the
subject of Halloween is mentioned. The recipe is easy, and it sounds delicious!
There are also some clever decorating ideas in this book. One of the best
is the skeleton bones made from self-hardening clay. Other books usually recommend polymer clay for similar
projects, but when I saw the self-hardening clay (such as Crayola classroom clay) used, the results were
much more effective.
You can also learn to make your own unique pumpkin for a centerpiece, using crafts materials. This is a fine alternative
to store-bought artificial pumpkins that all tend to look alike.
Generally, this is a good book to borrow from the public library, and you'll probably borrow it
before every Halloween. If your library doesn't own at least one
copy, tell them to order one. This book is definitely worth reading and referring to, annually.
I'm not sure that it offers enough
innovative material to buy your own new copy of it... but I'd probably buy a used copy of it, for reference.
