Halloween 2006: House Decorations

Halloween 2006: House Decorations!

The nice thing about having a "crafty" partner, is she's going to surprise you in the areas you're most interested in. In this case, we're talking about Halloween.

The Final Product

Pictured are glowing ghosts, gravestones, the "Enter at your own risk" sign, and the spider on the roof.

Here's another photo taken in the daylight.

The rest of this page is how we put it all together...

Gravestones!

The headstones were made from 4' x 2' sheets of plywood. I cut them down to 3' x 2'. I'll show you what I did with the rest of the wood later.

I sketched the approximate shapes of the tops of the "stones," on a piece of paper and Dani made templates like the one in the photo which I traced onto the boards then cut it with a jigsaw and circular saw.

Here are the three we made in various stages of production:

1) Bare wood
2) Coat of white paint
3) Grey stone paint.

And Lady the Pug. Obviously.

Here's the "stone creations" paint. You can find similar varieties of this at most hardware stores. Craft stores have loads of variations if you're particular. I'm sure you can figure out how to simulate marble if you want to get really fancy, but we weren't that ambitious this year.

After I sprayed the first "stone," I found that a better approach was to do the outer edges first, then do a thinner coat around the middle.

In all cases, I'm only barely putting any spray onto these, much less than you would if you were trying to do a true coat of paint.

I gave Dani some silly sayings her for the gravestones which she changed into different fonts and sized them before she printed them out. She traced those onto each of the boards and painted in the letters in black.

The dogs were there for moral support.

And here are the final products!

What about those leftovers, you ask? Well, here they are...

I used one of them to make spikes (you can see the lines they're going to be cut along on the piece in Dani's hand) and I attached another one to each of the "stones" to fold out and act as an additional support.

This is how the back of the "stones" look. They're staked into the ground, plus the "leg" helps on windy days.

We also picked up the rocks at a construction site nearby mostly for support, but there is an aesthetic component as well.

Dani had some flowers inside that were dying. Rather than throwing them away, I put them out, then stuffed gloves full of newspaper and put them over more stakes I put into the ground (made out of scrap wood I cut into smaller strips).

Enter At Your Own Risk!

Look familiar? If you've seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show as many times as I have over the years, then probably so. Since that's what we planned to do costume-wise this year, I wanted an iconic prop to be included among the other, more clichéd bits.

This board started out as the back of an old dresser that literally fell apart and was beyond repair. I painted it white first, then decided to go with black around the edges for more of a contrast, which I'm half-way finished with in this picture.

Actually one of the dogs decided to sniff the paint and ended up smuding the "R" in the middle of the sign. We had to fix that before we put it out.

I attached a couple hangers to the back of the board so I could run thread through them. This let me hang it at the goofy angle.

One of my goals for next year is (faux) wrought iron fencing that no self-respecting gothic mansion should be without.

Ghosts!

These plastic skulls light up. They are made of fused plastic beads that are easy to penetrate with a sewing needle. Dani ran some fine-gauge fishing line through them to hang them from.

She also cut the bottom of the sheets since that's the rage among all the fashionable ghosts.

We hung a couple from the porch and a couple more from the tree in the front yard. With the skull lit up in the dark of night, it's really cool looking to see the face backlit through the sheet.

Here's a photo taken without the flash. Obviously, this looks a bit more dramatic than you would expect to see at night on our reasonably well-lit street, but the photo is pretty creepy.

Spiders!

Dani can make anything out of scraps and a sewing machine.

MacGuyver has nothing on her.

The black fabric was just something I found on the curb that one of our neighbors was throwing out. The stuffing was packing material for eBay stuff I had on hand, mostly styrofoam with some foam cut into blocks shown here waiting to be stuffed.

A lot of the packing was placed inside a plastic bag inside the spider, which turned out to be a pretty good idea since it helped the spider dry out much faster after having been rained on.

The spider's eyes were buttons we picked up from a craft store. We bought some in different sizes than the rest since that's how spider eyes are, typically.

The legs are metal wire about the thickness of wire clothes hangers. We cut this to length and doubled and wound it upon itself for strength, then covered it over with the fabric.

I added some sheetrock screws to the roof to give a few more attachment points for the cobwebs. (I have yet to do a home improvement job in which I haven't found an excuse to use sheetrock screws for something.)

You can see that the leg in the center of the frame has been attached to the top of the overhang. The other legs are attached similarly.

Here's the black widow and the spider. You put a girl in jeans on a rooftop with Halloween decorations, and you're a Stratocaster in her hand away from the sexiest photo I can conceive of ever taking.

And then the spider started having babies! This one was still in progress when I took this picture. Also, the sewing machine had broke down (It's cursed!!!), so that stopped the assembly line. By the time Dani finally got it working again, she was in high-gear to get the costumes finished.

The baby didn't get get up to the roof for a couple days since it rained after Dani finally finished him (or her?).

It's hard to see at this resolution, but I have a white strand holding the spider from the roof, but I also have a thin piece of fishing line attached from the spider's head to the ground, so he doesn't go every which way when the wind blows.

And here's how it all looks together.

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