Budget Party – Under $15 Halloween Party

When Oriental Trading offered me some products for a Halloween blog post I was very excited. The real challenge was not wanting to buy EVERYTHING. So I set myself a challenge to spend as little as possible. (Crazy I know).

My first criteria with Halloween Decorations was that they were CHILD friendly. Even if my kids find blood and gore acceptable, I don’t. When I came across the BOO Bunch Range I thought it was perfect. I bought the following items below, which came in packs of 12 giving me loads of decorations for my very large room. I used two black table cloths (which I already had) to cover the table. I finished off the table with last years trick or treating buckets but you can buy some new ones and still be under $15. We were lucky enough to have a black wall so we used chalk to decorate it. We will probably add some more spiders and webs to the wall before the party too (using chalk).

Once you have added the food the table will not look so bare and it will add a new dimension. (I will add updated photo’s once the day arrives and the food goes out)

Boo Bunch Dangling Swirls – $2.99

Boo Bunch Cutouts $4.99

Black Table cloth $1.50

Jack O lantern tubs $2 for discount store

Add some extra Jack O Lanterns for a bigger party.

Oriental Trading supplied a $100 store credit for this review. I have some more exciting BUDGET party themes coming up soon!. Thanks Oriental Trading!

There are a lot of stories out there these days about AI use in the crafting space for everything from answering technique questions to writing patterns.

And there’s a lot of content about how to spot AI patterns, or even just photos on the Internet that people are claiming to have made but are clearly AI generated.

As the models get better, though, it can be harder to tell. Gone (mostly) are the days of AI sewing patterns with models who have too many fingers, but one thing it’s still hard for AI to replicate is individual stitches.

You’ll see this in knitting, crochet and cross stitch, where a project might look good from a distance but if you zoom in you’ll see there aren’t individual stitches, or they don’t look the way real stitches would look.

That’s part of the rationale behind a change at r/CrossStitch, the largest cross stitch community on Reddit, which now requires people to show a close up of their finished projects (lots of people seem to be showing off the backs, too) to prove their projects aren’t AI.

Lord Libidan reported on this news and I agree with them that I’m not sure why people in an online forum would be sharing AI “finished objects” when it’s a venue where you can’t sell patterns. But I understand their desire to keep the forum free of AI images. I wish Etsy had such a requirement so that people selling patterns had to prove they’d actually stitched them (though there are plenty of patterns that just show a chart and not a finished item, AI or not.)

Lord Libidan probably has a different perspective because he’s seen people selling kits made from an AI version of a free cross stitch pattern of his. Which is another layer.

I have my own feelings about AI and crafting but I just think it’s really interesting both the things people will do with AI without saying it’s AI and the lengths other people will go to in order to prove something is or isn’t AI. Or even calling something AI just because it’s really detailed and looks good? What times we live in.

[Photo via Lord Libidan, closeup of an image made by Google Gemini’s Nano Banana]

Have you read?