| HALLOWEEN 2002 |
| Well, we almost weren't going to have a party this year because of the baby and all the work it takes, but we talked ourselves into it! Here's a few ideas we've done this year. There's not too much to report this year as we've recycled many props and used them in different scenarios. |
| ROBOT HELL |
| BLOODY DINNER |
| WALL OF EYES |
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| Here's a few props I've already bought to start working on the bloody dinner table. Major thank you's to Universal Studios Orlando for the hands. I found the icky sticky eyeballs! Yahoo! They are selling them at WalMart for $2 for a six pack. That's a great deal! I've been looking all over for them and found them right under my nose. This year I will be designing our dining room table to be a disgusting feast of eyes, hands, brains and whatever else I can conjur up from my bag of goodies. |
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| I started Wall of eyes, and instead of putting it all on one canvas, I figured I'd build it on 2 pieces of wood and prop it up somewhere. So far so good, except I just painted it and the latex paint is not sticking to the Great Stuff. I'll have to go back to the ole drawing board for this one. I like the way the great stuff turned out though. I went through 4 cans of Great Stuff and 3 bags of ping pong ball eye balls. UPDATE: Okay, so I remembered I was not supposed to use Latex based paint on great stuff. I used an oil based paint to paint the great stuff. Ah well, you live, you learn. Anyways, I found if you use just spraypaint, it is extremely dull, so use the oil based stuff. It takes a few days to dry, so get projects like this done early. Turned out pretty good if you ask me! By the way, the 2nd finished picture is a picture of it laying on a dropcloth on gravel, so don't get the wrong idea. |
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| THE GUARDIANS |
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| Here are some more guardians of my front yard. These are very simple to make. I bought a bunch of plastic skeleton heads, glow in the dark kind, and colored in their eyes, nose and teeth, with black magic marker. I then bought 3 ft thin poles you can buy at Home Depot for about $1-$2 each and put rubber cement at the tip as well as rubber cement around the hole at the bottom of the skull to stick on there. You can also use hot glue..that sticks better. For the cross bar, you can use any kind of flat wood to stick across. I took flat beams from trellace and broke them apart to stick on there. I used duct tape and wrapped around twice, like in an X shape to hold the cross bar on. I tried to nail them on, but found the nail would split the cross beam. I spray painted the whole thing black, and even shadowed the skulls, just a little with the paint. After the crosses were made, I cut up and wrapped cheese cloth around it, also lightly spraying black spray paint here and there to give it a weathered look. I made 6 of these, plus have the 2 from previous years in the front yard. |
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| FLYING CRANK GHOST |
| We decided to put our gal up on the front porch this year instead of in the garage window. Andy built a facade window around her and inside are the fake stone walls from the dungeon from last year. Nothing too fancy, but our guests just love her. |
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| Here is what the bloody dinner table looked like finished. I put the table under a ceiling fan with lights and only screwed in 1 red lightbulb. It was very eeire. As you can see, I utilized the stumps and eyeballs around the table. I made the plates out of regular white paper plates with the oil based red paint to look like blood. I decorated the table with old dead roses in vases and plastic flower stems (I cut the flowers off and spray painted the plastic stems with black.). I also scattered dead rose petals, leaves, plastic spiders, a few skulls and an empty bottle of vampire wine. I only put in 1 chair, but if you wanted to go all out, you could cover your dining room table chairs and even add skeletons in the seats for the "feast." The table cloth was a white sheet I got at a thrift store and splattered with red paint. I ripped the sides up of the cloth up a bit to make it seem more ragged. I had a few plastic butcher knives that I also put out. |
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| All I can say about Robot Hell is "wow." This room turned out really really good. Much better than any of us even expected. Dano built everything for this room! I made the pictures bigger this time so you can see the many details of the props in it. We tood a corner of one room and built it up in there. This was put together in a matter of a few hours! Dano built the robot, 2nd picture, and the idea basically came from him. All the props around him were things like old pepsi bottle carriers, styrofoam, foam board, parts of tubing, metal, plastic, an old oil drum, the alien cryogenic chamber, etc. You can basically glue and paint things in various patterns to create chaos like this. The best part of all of this is the robot, Skeletron, has servos in him that allows him to dance, sing and move in a pattern that follows the music of mp3s streaming from the internet. (wshew!!). Andy hooked up the internet connection and Dano hooked up Skeletron to dance and move. It was the showcase of the house! Our guests just loved this. He also sang and danced along with an Oingo Boingo song imitating actions and words. It was awesome!! |
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