Haunting Your Yard!

We got more done today than I thought we would.  Thank goodness for the beautiful weather!

Way back when I blogged about our “find” at a local recycle place.  It was metal work to make an arch for our existing pillars and a secondary entrance to the graveyard.

Shane finally was able to give it some time today and the second entrance is complete.  I am really happy with how this turned out.  It’s hard to see in the sun, but he also added spider webs to it by using that great Webcaster Gun.  This time though we did use fishing line to get the webbing started.

Dylan spent the day working on the voodoo guy that will go in the voodoo section of our walk through.

Voodoo guy was made using pvp pipe for the limbs, batting to give him bulk, a wig holder head to put in the mask, and some hands from another prop that broke years ago and I just happened to keep the hands.

Most of my day was spent tearing apart the walls that were used in previous years.  We had put chicken wire and paper mache on them to create cave walls.  We now want to use those walls in the “slabatorium”, so I have been taking all the chicken wire and paper mache off.  If I never see chicken wire again I’ll be happy!  After I finished that I worked on bloodying up a prop we bought and I also put the lettering on the door, and the blood.  The door we got at the recycle place for $10.  I cut out the template to put the lettering on.  Then I bloodied up my hands and put those on the window.

If you are new to the home and yard haunting for Halloween, I’m sure you’ve done a lot of research on the internet regarding headstones, graveyards, etc.  There is a lot of information out there and some amazing pictures of some yard haunters set ups.

It can be a little discouraging if you are just getting started because most people, like us, with the big set ups and large Halloween graveyards have spent years building up their stash.  To have a truly cool looking graveyard takes a lot of time and well, cash.  Even if you make a lot of the props yourself.

When we started our graveyard years ago, we started out small.  Most of the headstones from the earlier days have been replaced with the more realistic, custom ones.  If you are just getting started, a great way to do that is by using things you might have just sitting around the house.  We actually used to go dumpster diving because there was a lot of new construction near where we live.  So many of our first headstones were made out of wood and painted.

Wood is definitely not as easy, in my opinion, to work with as the foam.  But it is sturdy.  We did find it more challenging to stake to the ground.  With foam you can put a metal rod right up the inside of the foam.

Another method we sometimes use to vary our headstones is to glue pieces we’ve created using plaster of paris and molds on to the foam.   Many designs we etch out of the foam, but the plaster of paris pieces are another good option and there are tons of molds to pick from.  Once you’ve primed it and painted over it, it looks like it’s just part of the headstone.

We had some questions recently regarding our tombstones that I thought we would answer:

The foam from  Home Depot is the pink sheets in the wood/building section.  You can get the same type of foam at Lowe’s - there it is blue.  Depending on the size of your tombstones, you can get multiple headstones out of one sheet.  Left over pieces make great “markers” - small, rock type pieces that have maybe only a date on them, or nothing.  We’ve seen these in many cemeteries - small little pieces propped up.

You do have to be careful about the paint you use as some (especially spray paints) will eat the foam.  Some people use that technique to carve the stone.  We use tools to do that.  Latex paint is always the way we go.  I put a primer on first, then the color.  Check the “oops” paint section  - that is where we have gotten most of our paints at a fraction of the price.  Once you put a base coat on, you can start doing more specialized techniques to “age” your stones.  Putting paint on heavier in areas where you think it would look like the stones would naturally “leach” minerals - then take a spray bottle filled with water, spray the paint, let it start to drip, and then what I do is use a dry paint brush to drag the paint down.  I keep doing that until I get the look I want.

Finish your stones off by adding moss.

The tombstone Shane is working on here in the picture he just started.  It is an Edgar Allen Poe headstone.  He is carving out a raven on a branch at the top.  With this headstone he carved out the areas around the picture to bring the raven out - sometimes he’ll do the opposite and etch the picture in - which is always easier as he can use a dremel for that.  This technique takes longer.

So this weekend Dylan finished up editing the Save the Date teaser:

Halloween Date Teaser

He did a great job!

That’s pretty much what got accomplished other than finalizing the plan for the walk through in the garage on Halloween night and going over to the Resource Recycle place and getting two cool old chairs with claw feet and a cool old door as props - all for $30.

We did go over to Spirit Halloween while in Boulder, but nothing seems to entice us any longer.  All we walked out of there with was vampire fangs for Dylan and a bottle of latex for Shane for some mask he is going to do.  Although that place is expensive so it’s a good thing that’s all we left with!

So we were back out at the shop yesterday, working on our projects.  What we did/needed to be done:

We had to finish the tombstone we were making for the coach of a football team.  Then Shane was going to start my toe pincher coffin because we need it for the mini movie we are making that will be the “save the date” for our guests for the Halloween party.  Once the mini movie is done I’ll post it.

I was going to start changing the skeleton.  What that was going to be like, I wasn’t sure when I started.

And I got Dylan going on painting some columns we’ve had for ages.

First off, the coffin.  We want to make this one on the fancy side.  It will be completely trimmed out, with decorative pieces on the front and sides and we plan to line it as well with batting and some sort of silk.

The first thing he did was use the table saw to notch out the sides so the pieces fit together.

Then they slowly started adding the sides.  This particular coffin is designed to fit me.  We were planning on making one for everyone this year, but the cost is going to put that on hold.

They were short a bit of wood for the side so the plan this week is to get that finished, get it trimmed out and stained so that next weekend we can finish the inside.  This coffin (toe pincher) will be used as an indoor prop in our vampire mansion room.

A rough estimate of the cost would be about $200 ish for materials.

Next, I was working on the skeleton.  This whole thing is an experiment so I just got a plastic skeleton to work on.  I am not ready yet to venture into getting the expensive ones.  The first mistake made was I got the wrong batting, which I didn’t realize until I started working on the prop.  I need cotton batting and we got poly.  It isn’t taking the paint well and on the whole, the plastic skeletons don’t (I stained some last year so I knew this already).  The effect right now is of a burned victim - I only did so much and am letting it dry (takes forever) before trying any more.  If I am still not terribly happy with the outcome, I will go to plan B which is use paper towel strips to make it more mummy like.

One thing I do with these plastic skeletons is cut out pieces of plastic between the ribs, the eyes, the mouth, arms, etc.

It’s always good to have more than one project going on at a time because while something is drying you can switch to something else.  That’s what Dylan and I did with the columns he was repainting and the headstone we were working on.

The columns will be used in the vampire mansion room.  One will have a dead floral arrangement on it.  The other, a bust of a vampire we got at Michael’s.  Dylan painted them a red color and then I went back and “aged” them a bit.  I did this by taking black paint, getting as much off the brush as possible, and doing a dry brush over the columns.  Here is a before and after:

The last thing we did was finish up the headstone that was ordered.  This is not for Halloween.  A football coach had us do one to put their season from last year to rest.  He wanted something very, very basic - no distressing or aging really.  I still did a bit of aging using paint as I couldn’t stand to have it go out the door so plain.

The technique I use to do that is to put a line of black paint at the top, then use a spray bottle filled with water to spray the paint, and a dry paint brush to drag it.  I do this over and over again until I’m happy with the result.  Normally I would do a lot more of this and also add the moss.  They would also have cracks and distress - but he didn’t want any of that, so this is really a very basic headstone.

That pretty much wrapped up our day.  More to come….