A "Couple" of Ground Breakers

I had such a GREAT weekend. I'll post more later about that, but most importantly... I finished my first project(s) of the year (so behind).

Last week I mentioned the beginning stage of "hacking" a certain store-bought ground breaker. These guys were super cheap, one was picked up from a store - after halloween sale, the other came from a lot-for-sale off of Craigstlist. What to do, what to do... so I searched the internet for inspiration. Came across this lady.

I mentioned before in a previous blog how I mangled the head here. I used the same technique. Took the head off the body, removed the hair, cut the styrofoam and used paper towels and carpet adhesive. (note: I used Bounty, should have used Viva - no bumps/designs in paper towels are best). Waited a good week for that to dry, then painted their faces with craft paint and used polyurethane to seal.

In the meantime while their heads were drying. I gathered up some of the extra red velvet I had from some curios I have been working on. I also grabbed some black cheese cloth, along with little items I had in my craft/sewing box (the black satin rose). No sewing required on my ghoul-friend, just hot glue and used my imagination. Went into my costume bin and grabbed an old witch wig. Asked my son if I could have his old suit tie which worked perfect for the guy-ghoul. I used water and craft paint to make the tie dirty and used a dull razor blade to give it a grungy effect. Added plenty of moss on the bottom of their torsos as well as sporadically on their body, hands, face and head. To give it that fresh ground breaker look.

I can not begin to tell you how happy I was after I finished her.

Below you can see start to finish photos.

Easterween & Mummies Day

Little late, but better than never. I spent the day before Easter with my mini witch in training dying easter eggs. I decided to get a little more creative with my eggs this year instead of using the tradional pastels, making circles or stripes. What if I had a halloween inspired easter!

So, I made an orange one into a pumpkin, a green egg into zombie, a purple egg into skeleton (seen above), and a midnight blue one into bat (seen above). I thought I did such a fabulous job, but after taking them out of the dye I noticed the clear wax crayons were not-so fabulous. Next year, maybe I will dye them first, then use some inexpensive craft acrylic paint to them.

Last, but not least on Mothers Day I received a real Bucky! Not a blucky! My very first BUCKY!!!!!  Not sure that I will wind up corpsing him, think I will keep him just the way he is. As for right now I find him sitting against the wall or in a corner of about every room in the haunted mansion. It's quite funny not sure how he's getting around, but he does.

Only, 160 days till Halloween my happy haunters!

Tombstones!!!

This weekend started off pretty dull... the weather wasn't really great, my broom otherwise known as the 61 Falcon was acting ghoulishly evil. So I pulled out paint and started to touch up my walls, doors and boarders. Also take a shot at that glazing project. Well the touchup paint is NOT the same color as my walls and the glazing/faux project kinda went on a sour note because I just wasn't too crazy about it. It looks great from afar but I'm just not sure I want my entire living room looking like that.

So what does Madame Jen do next? She goes back into the garage to put away the paint cans and finds herself staring at (what I thought was 6 boxes) 8 containers of Halloween decor. I took everything down and went through them all. I forgot that I had got some stuff on clearance last year. I had several masks that will work perfect on those mannequin heads! My big ghoul, Dylan's costume from last year is going to be perfect to put to use on my zombie. Oh and my best witch Mandi was on the phone with me, she says I'm a hoarder because I only found 6 bags of moss left over from last year. *cackles* (note to self, you do not need anymore moss for at least 3 years)

Ok so below (and forgive me for uploading these pictures backwards) are the tombstones. As you can see I started off with several tombstones I got at the Dollar Tree, some moss, plastic bugs, and those sticks I steal from my neighbors lawns that come from Scotts lawn service. I used my glue gun to stick the lawn stick onto the back of my tombstone. Remember if your glue gun is hot temp do not put the hot glue on your styrofoam tombstones! Put the glue on your stick and wait a few seconds then place on tombstone. You might want to apply some pressure to ensure it sticks. Remember the reason I use these sticks is because the sticks that come with the tombstones do not do very good in the wind. These sticks I use are perfect and they do not come out of the ground due to high wind and are strong enough to keep them up.

Next, I just play around with the moss. I always like to put some along the bottom. Therefore you do not really see the end of the tombstone touching your grass. It kind of hides it and makes it realistic looking, great effect! I also like to place some green moss into the nooks and crannies on the tombstone and sometimes along the top/sides. I use green moss for the bottom and occasionally I'll use some spanish moss at the top. Just use your glue gun and place wherever...

Last, but not least plastic bugs.... I use spiders, rats, flies, etc.. I didn't use the purple ones only because they don't look that real. I took a close up of the spider on the one tombstone. With my glue gun I made a web effect around the spider. By doing that I just touched the tip of the glue gun to the points and slowly dragged over the glue "string". No need to pull the trigger. Just bring the gun back and forth and down and touch.

The two tombstones shown at the top were bought on clearance last year. They are about 2x bigger than the Dollar Tree ones, I added some larger spiders and a black crow I purchased at the Dollar Tree to them.

Of course that's not ALL I did this weekend.... there's plenty more where this came from! I worked on some creepy jars, worked on my zombie and played with some skulls. Coming soon....

60 more days till Samhain!

Cheesecloth and Papier Mache

This weekend I worked on dying the cheesecloth. A fellow witch named Cynthia gave me a great idea to put the cheesecloth in my cauldron and add some tea bags for an old yellow/lt brown look. I added 6 tea bags into the cauldron, 5 yards of cheesecloth and left it sitting overnight. The following morning I took it out and it wasn't as dark as I would have liked so I just added some more tea bags. Thanks to Cynthia I saved a few bucks buying tan/brown dye. :)

I had picked up some black RIT several weeks ago and put that into my sink and added the other cheesecloth's that I had and that came out a really neat grey/purple color. I had about 9 yards in there and left it sitting for about 30 min.

Started back on my papier mache zombie face. I added eyes and a nose and more layers to the head.

Cleaning out your fridge makes for good halloween finds too! I took several condiment glass jars that were almost empty and maybe had one or two pickles left in it. I think I had about 3 glass jars of pepperoncinis. I cleaned them out, submerged them in hot water and let them sit for a while, until the labels came off. Glass jars make for great witch potion jars and/or specimen jars for a lab scene.

On Sunday morning I was helping one of my ghouls organize her room. In her toy box I found some rubber snakes, rubber roaches and some vampire teeth! I was excited and thought it would make great additions to some of my skeleton projects.

So pictures will be uploaded this week. My Frankenstein left the cord to the camera at his work but, will return it this evening so I can upload some of my projects thus far. Can't wait to share!

Until next time... happy hauntings!