More butterflies for Halloween

Variations on creepy...

Every year I add at least one little piece in pursuit of building something really elaborate and fun.

Setting up for Halloween

Here's the house decked out for Halloween. I still have to decorate the porch but the yard and window are done. At night the crosses have electric tea lights to make them visible and the window is lit; it is really pretty.

New cartoneria cat for Halloween!

A friend of mine posted a picture of a miniature Dia de los Muertos inspired cat figurine on his Facebook page and it inspired me to make a full-size cat skeleton. I wasn't going to do a cartoneria cat this year; my first priority was butterflies followed by another pair of cartoneria skeletons. I have been unusually unmotivated this year and have now abandoned the idea of the extra skeletons, but the cat will satisfy my craving for paper mache.

To start I made the wire frame using 16.5 gauge wire sold in the hardware store as "tie wire". It is cheap but has a greasy coating that will quickly turn your fingers black from handling it.



I learned my lesson from my first experience making skeletons: it is much harder to go back and try to force wires through a finished piece of paper mache than it is to incorporate the wires in the first place. If you are going to make something that will be suspended in the air, go ahead and plan for that from the start! For my skeletons I made each piece separately for flexibility in posing and ease of storage but with this cat I don't think that will work, so I am making a fixed figure that will likely have to be stored outside of a box. Oh, well.

Then I built up the figure using well-crumpled newspaper and pieces of masking tape.



Next will be the application of glue soaked strips of newspaper...

Butterfly decorations for Halloween

Because butterflies are something you think of for Halloween decorations, right? Well, maybe not.

My goal is to make my Halloween decorations a little more elaborate every year. This year I am making butterflies to hang up on my porch or wherever seems interesting. I cut the basic butterfly shapes out of 1/8 inch tempered hardboard (Masonite) using a bandsaw, then coated one side with store-bought acrylic gesso. Now I am painting the butterflies in bright colors. It is a fun project and a great way to reactivate my rusty painting skills.

My goal is to make them pretty, but somewhat creepy. Am I succeeding?

Time to prepare for Halloween

Halloween is my favorite decorating holiday of the year. Ever since the time I was a child trick-or-treating and came across a neighbor's yard decorated like a cemetery I was smitten. In my growing up years (and beyond) it was one of my dreams to have a house with a front yard in a neighborhood where I could decorate and people would come by the house on Halloween. Now I have that yard, and I decorate it. Every year I work to make it a little better.

It takes months of preparation, working intermittently when I am not at work or doing other things, to make more decorations. In 2008 I made some tall skinny crosses for a graveyard. They look great, come apart for easy storage, and are useful for a variety of Halloween themes.

How I made them:

I used inexpensive 1 x 2 inch lumber, cut the pieces to desired lengths for the cross shapes, then used a dado blade in a table saw to quickly cut lap joints. I allowed some slop in the joints to account for the space taken by the paint.

To get the aged look I first painted all the wood black. Then I painted it with a crackle glaze I purchased at the hardware store in the paint department. Finally I painted the wood with a very light gray paint. White paint would have been too bright for the aged look I was attempting but the grey appears to be white but is not too bright.

In the picture below I have three pieces of wood. One is black with the clear crackle glaze, the middle piece is wood that had just been painted with the light gray but has not started to crackle, and the third piece is a piece that has been painted and partially dried and crackled.