Halloween Applique Pattern

I’ve spent the past 8 days or so in bed.  And as a CFS patient, that usually means one thing.

Eight or so days ago, I was having FUN.  🙂

For the past few years, Doug’s family has had a family reunion in October.  The first year started off with a bang.  Mainly because for some random reason a big group of us adults wanted to plan a Harry Potter party.  We swore it was for the kids… but let’s be honest.  I think only one of them was old enough to even know who Harry Potter was at the time…

Over the years the Harry Potter theme changed to a more general Halloween theme, but the idea of a big party stuck.  It’s been so fun!  I love planning parties, but whenever I think of throwing one the introvert inside of me thinks, ‘Yeah… but then you’d have to go to a party.’   And let me tell you, 9 times out of 10 the introvert part of me wins.

A family party is the perfect compromise.  All the fun planning.  No awkward small talk.  Sign me up!

This year, while preparing for the big reunion/Halloween party my mom shared a pin with me.  It was a Thanksgiving table cloth.  Every year everyone at Thanksgiving dinner signed it.  Now it’s a treasure to pull out every year.  How fun!  My mom and I discussed how much we wished we’d known about the idea when I was a kid.  It got my brain churning.  I didn’t have any specific Thanksgiving plans yet… but there was the annual Halloween party coming up…

So I dove right in. Here’s my Halloween table runner version.  Yeah, I know, it’s completely different.  But to me the important parts stayed true to the idea!  The name of each family member who attended the reunion was on included, adults were embroidered on bats and kids names were on the ghosts.  (I blurred out most the names for privacy issues, but I left ours on there so you can see what I mean)

And the best part- each ghost is made from a tracing of the child’s foot!

Sure, it doesn’t capture every year since 1976 (like the Thanksgiving table cloth we saw on Pinterest).  But it does capture a fun memory from this year!  I am so excited for it to be pulled out a few years from now so we can see how much the kids have grown.

If you’d like to add this applique to your own Halloween creation, you can get the images for the bats and house here.  (no ghost images because they are just outlines of feet!) I used a raw edge applique technique to attach all the shapes, it is the same technique we used for our Ranunculus Applique video tutorial so you can see how to do it there!