I Finally Have a Minion!

My little brother has offered to spend the next five Saturdays in the garage with me getting the yard ready for this Halloween.  Yesterday we spent the day working on the new and hopefully improved cemetery fence.  We were able to get most of the fence sections assembled and painted.  Next week we will finish the fence and set it up that evening.  Then we will be moving on to some fun stuff like lighting and tombstones.  Hopefully we will get into a little corpsing.  I have high hopes for how much will be accomplised now that I have a minion of my very own.

Here's my minion running the paint sprayer.

YARDSALE!

So, as I was driving back from taking my son to kindergarten today, I passed a house that has been having a yard sale for the past week and a half.  Today I noticed some Halloween items that weren't visible on previous days.  I stopped to take a look.  The proprietess of the yard sale informed me that the Halloween items would not be for sale until Wednesday, but I was free to take a look.  As I was perusing her wares, she asked me if my back was sound. I replied that it was and she said that she would be willing to let me buy Halloween merchandise early and make me an extra good deal if I would be willing to move some heavy boxes for her.  I spent about ten minutes moving boxes and about twenty minutes selecting my purchases and left with all of this for only five bucks.

These little hanging skeletons will be great for indoor decorating.

You can never have enough bleeding skull taper candles.

I am going to make a body for this oversized skull.  He'll look good in the cemetery.

A couple of blucky skulls and a really nice resin anatomical model skull.

I've always wanted one of these guys.  It's amazing how realistic the flame effect is on these.

Doodle Time

Now that I am back in school and find myself sitting in classes for up to two hours at a time, I am starting to accumulate doodles.

These are some MATH 1010 inspired doodles.  I think I will chronicle my doodles (as crude and amateurish as they are) here as a way to gauge my overall level of boredom with school.

Tombstone Update

Here are some progress pictures of my new tombstones for this year.

These pictues show the tombstones after a base coat of grey exterior latex paint.

These pictures show the tombstones after a blackwash with some watered down black outdoor latex paint and then a drybrush with some watered down grey outdoor latex paint the same color as the base coat.  The last picture is of a tombstone that was meant to be just for practice, but it turned out looking OK.  I decided to make it part of the cemetery this year.  I still have some weathering and maybe some moss to add to these tombstones.  I will post more pictures when they are done.

Cemetery Fence 2.0

Some of you may remember that last year I scored about 10 of these plastic columns from my employer.  My intention was to use them as fence columns for a cemetery fence.  I put together a bunch of eight-foot fence sections using PVC pipe (also free from work) and scrap 1 x 3 wood.  I used small metal brackets to attach the fence sections directly to the columns.  All this was done very last minute and while it looked good (we got a lot of compliments from people driving by), it wasn't extremely solid.  Now for the error part of the trial and error system.  The columns are hollow plastic and are in two sections.  the bottom section is about 4 feet tall and is open at the bottom.  the top section is about another 2 feet tall and is open at the top.  One week before Halloween we had a major rainstorm.  During the night, the top sections of the fence columns filled up with water, making them top heavy.  When the wind hit it was all over.  We woke up to find every fence column tipped over and many of the fence sections broken.  I threw out all of the fence sections and put the columns away (only after cutting a hole in the bottom of all the top sections so that water could not collect in them), vowing to learn from my mistakes in the next year.  Well next year is now.

I decided that the surface of the columns was too uneven to attach the fence sections directly.  I bolted a section of 2 x 4 to the columns with a nice wide bracket at the top and bottom.  The height of the 2 x 4 is the same as the space between the bottom and middle rail of the fence sections.  I squirted some Great Stuff behind the 2 x 4 to fill in all of the nooks and crannies and give the 2 x 4 a more solid base.

Here you can see how the fence sections will sit on the brackets.  There is still a lot to do on this project.  I will post more on my progress in the next couple of days.

Tombstone Update

Well, I finally finished carving and engraving my first batch of styrofoam tombstones.  I used stencils that I made with my wife's Cricut machine for the lettering.  All of the detailing was done with a soldering iron.  Some very minimal shaping was done with a hacksaw blade.  Each of these tombstones is named for each of my four kids.

This tombstone reads:  Samuel (our oldest son) and then:  Sam Bones (his nickname because of how freakishly skinny he is).  His cause of death is listed as:  wasted away.  The skull detail was made by cutting the back from a Great Stuff foam skull that I had laying around.  I attached it with some hot glue.  The shaping around the skull was done with a hacksaw blade.

This tombstone reads:  Abigail (our oldest daughter) and then:  Abbiecadabra (this seemed almost too cute; but I went with it anyway).  Her cause of death is listed as:  burned at the stake (duh).  The pentagram detail was just one that I found with a Google image search for pentagram.  I pretty much just free handed it with a Sharpie and then engraved it with a soldering iron.

This tombstone reads:  Noah (our youngest son) and then:  Noah Constrictor (this was his nickname when he was a toddler because he was a major hugger.  He liked to get his arms around you and just squeeze as tight as he could).  His cause of death is listed as:  stuffed and mounted (bummer).  The snake detail is based loosely on the logo for the TV show Millennium.  I did quite a bit of detail work with the soldering iron trying to get the snake to look more three dimensional.  It should really pop out after it is painted.  Again I did a little shaping in the center with a hacksaw blade.

This tombstone reads:  Emma (our youngest daughter) and then:  Emma Sue The Littlest Zombie (I know it's a mouthful; but trust me, it fits her).  Her cause of death is listed as:  her fate is unknown.  This was the simplest design out of all four tombstones.  I just did a Google image search for girl silhouette.  All the detail work was done with a soldering iron.

These tombstones will get a coat or two of Dry-Lok and then a nice paint job (hopefully this week).

Put a Lid on That Mud.

I was toying with the idea of putting together a monster mud prop this year until I spent an entire weekend retexturing the house...

I am officially not in the mood.

FREEDOM!!!

It's become a tradition for me to carve at least one melon-o-lantern on the fourth of July.  So, I hope you enjoy my celebration of my freedom to pay tribute to Halloween in July.

Fun With Foam!

Those of you who have read previous posts on this blog know that originally, all of the tombstones in my cemetery were made from cardboard.  My reasoning for this was that at work I had access to plentiful and free cardboard.  Last season, however was unusually wet. This made for some very squishy tombstones.  This year I have decided to make the switch to foam tombstones.  I purchased a couple of 2 inch thick, 4 foot by 8 foot sheets of pink foam at the Home Depot.  Shortly thereafter, I stumbled upon 26 sheets of 2 1/2 inch thick, 16 inch by 45 1/2 inch white beaded foam and half of a sheet of the 2 inch thick pink foam in a dumpster at a construction site between work and home.  The white beaded foam is kind of hard to work with and messy so I decided to use these sheets to make some filler stones with a very basic shape and only details that could be added with a soldering iron which is the least messy method of working with this foam.  If I follow the method that Terra uses, sandwiching two sheets of foam together for each tombstone this should give me 13 good filler tombstones for my cemetery. 

I will make some tombstones with a flat top, 

some with a rounded top,

 And some with a pointed top.

I am always trying to give my kids a reason to hang out with me in the garage.  We decided that there were too many pieces of scrap foam going to waste.  We remedied this problem by making some little foam mementos that I know my wife will absolutely hate and probably not allow in the house.  This was good practice for me using the soldering iron to apply lettering and detail to the foam.  The Batman insignia in the second picture is my favorite, followed by the Super Mario mushroom.  I will use the pink foam for more detailed tombstones.

Look Honey, it's a sign... literally and figuratively.

As a home haunter with little to no budget, I have to be as creative and cheap as possible when building props. I have developed the habit of looking at any scraps, junk, and cast-offs that I encounter with an eye to their potential for prop-making. If I think that something could be of use in the future, I hold onto it. This practice is much maligned by my wife. Whenever I come home from work with anything loaded in the back of my truck, she rolls her eyes at me and I can tell that she is silently counting to ten in an effort to keep from launching into another ten-minute tirade about how there can't possibly be enough room in the garage for anymore junk.  Thus far I have manged to retain control of the garage; so long as there is room to park our vehicles inside, the rest of the space is mine.  The block on which our house was built used to belong to the city.  They used the space to park municipal vehicles and equipment and to store a lot of junk.  The empty lot next to our house consistently yeilds up random objects that leave us scratching our heads.  We have spent the last two years tilling up a patch of this empty lot trying to get a garden to grow.  After pulling out about a million rocks, countless chunks of concrete and blacktop, and two manhole covers we have some pretty decent dirt to work with.  This spring I made my most satisfying random discovery yet.  A metal sign with a message that seemed to be meant just for me.

The universe is trying to tell me something.  I think I will hang it in the garage.