In the mood for Halloween stitching

Back-to-school registration, less humidity during the days and cooler nights--it's starting to feel just a bit like autumn, and the Halloween stitching bug has bitten me! It started with the Great Cheshire Pumpkin SAL, which has now released half of the design:

Still a lot more fun things to come with this one; the next part will be released this coming weekend, but I won't be able to start it right away. My son and I will be driving to St. Louis for the solar eclipse--sure hope the weather cooperates and our eclipse glasses get here this week!

Last week my mom came to visit for my son's birthday. so of course I needed something I could do with my hands while spending time upstairs. It's getting harder and harder to stitch without the lights in my craft room, so I decided to pull out the wooden "book" box I bought last year and paint it in preparation to mount a design on it. Here is the picture I took last year:

And here is the finished box, along with my start on The Goode Huswife's The Book of Spells:

I've been working on Book of Spells for a few days now, and here it is as of last night:

The only color that I'm using from the pattern is the black; as it is a "primitive" design it is charted with a fairly muted palette. I'm going with my preferred palette of bright colors, and adding quite a bit of Kreinik for sparkle. I've had to rechart the bottom, as it was too long to fit on the box as charted, so we'll see how it turns out.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!