Haunting Your Yard!

We’ve had been busy getting the house ready for the Halloween party, which was this last Saturday and was a big success.

One thing we did for the party that will also be part of the walk through on Halloween night is get the voodoo room done.  These are some quick pictures Dylan took – one with flash and one without.  We’ll be adding to this a bit on Halloween night, so we’ll take some more detailed pictures then.

We are really happy with how this turned out.  The added extra element is the voodoo drums quietly playing in the background.  The room is lit only by candles.  The walls are pallets stacked on each other and screwed together.  I then hung the torn creepy cloth I made from the cheese cloth, and hung branches from my juniper bushes around.

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.

First off, all credit on these pictures goes to our son Dylan.

So far the witch is surviving any wind.  Yesterday we had some nice breezes.  Here she is during the day.  She is quite the sight on the peak of the roof.  The night picture didn’t turn out too bad, all things considered.  We did adjust the lighting and it is now reaching her face.

Now the ultimate picture would be a full moon behind her.  We’ll have to keep watch for when that might happen.

Her presence on the roof is bothering the dog next door!  Hopefully Ginger will get used to her.

Next we have the ghost in the mausoleum during the day and the night, after they used the Webcaster Gun to add the webbing.  Now this is a device we have tried to make ourselves, but were never able to get it to really work.  This year, I decided to just buy one and I bought the least expensive one – so I wasn’t too sure how the results would be.   Well, as you can see, the results turned out great.  It took a little experimenting – and if they had read the “tips” sheet that came with it they would have figured some things out sooner.  But they were so excited to try it out…. they had a lot of fun with it.

Basically it’s a modified glue gun hooked up to an air compressor.  It shoots the warmed glue sticks and creates the web effect.  Very cool and worth the price.  You can get them at BuyCostumes.com

Finally, we have some general pictures of the graveyard at night with the lighting.  We still haven’t gotten the flying crank ghost set up on the front porch.  But everything else is pretty much done.

So we started the outside setup this past weekend.  Most, but not quite all is done.  From here on out, much of the work will be focused on getting the walk through ready.

So I am posting pictures of the graveyard, mausoleum, etc. during the day.  Once we get the fcg up I’ll post some more.  We have some lighting touches to do regarding the witch – so night photos will be posted later.  These photos were taken during the setup process.  So not all elements are in the photos.

One thing that Shane and Dylan really had fun playing with was the web shooter that we bought.  They webbed up the mausoleum and it looks really cool at night.  I’ll post pictures tomorrow.

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!

Shane and Dylan finished the coffin on Monday and it turned out better than I would have ever thought.

So the first picture here is the coffin completed as far as all the trim and decorative pieces put on.  They filled in all the cracks and holes with wood putty, allowed that to dry, sanded it, etc.

Sunday we went back to the shop and they started staining.  Dylan would do the brushing on while Shane would do the wiping off.

To give it a bit of an older look they would leave the stain on longer in certain areas before wiping it off.

Monday they worked on adding the lining.  I didn’t go out to the shop with them, so I have no pictures of while they were doing it, but it was pretty much putting batting down, putting the satin over the batting, and stapling it to the coffin.  They brought it home Monday night since we had plans to use the coffin in the little “mini movie” we were doing for our Halloween Party save the date.

Here is the finished coffin on the outside and the inside.

As you can see, it turned out quite nice.

Last night we did the filming and they also took a few still of me in the coffin.  Here is how that turned out:

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….

So we are slowly making the transition from working and building in our garage to moving everything to our storage condo.  We are setting up a space there dedicated to Halloween props.  Which is exciting!  For one thing, we don’t have to continually keep putting everything up, or as what usually happens when we get close to Halloween – lose our garage and have to keep both cars parked outside.

The other great thing is what we work on will be kept secret – the neighborhood kids won’t be able to ask what we are doing this year!

We have decided to do our first walk through.  Part of it will be going through our house and out into the garage.   We plan to have friends help us keep the number of people coming through under control and we plan on building a couple of fake walls to keep the rest of the house from being visible.  As we start constructing those we’ll take pictures and post the progress.

So I’m eager to get going.  One of the things on our to-do list, besides adding some new tombstones, will be to construct a very real looking coffin, or as we like to call them in the Halloween world – toe pincher.

Stay tuned as we will start posting tutorials as we get started!