Craft Party 2015

Every year I hold a creepy craft party early in October. I always fail to get photos of everything, but I did capture quite a few creations this year. 

I think we have some of the most unique and glamorous voodoo dolls.  A little sass and a lot of style, much like their creators.

The plan was to make some glass eyes and this is what I love about these parties, folks deviated from the plan. I had thrown some catalogs with Halloween stuff in with the potion bottle labels, thinking some of the pictures might look cool on a bottle.  I never thought to use them with the flat marbles, but here we are. From striped candy to skulls, it's interesting how a bubble of glass adds so much depth.   The animal eyes are from orestesgraphics.com.  I can't remember where the human eyes are from but this tutorial has a nice one to use or just search on "iris texture"

 

We went through a lot of bottles this year.  The kids always like making really gross potions.  Some of the stuff is Halloween novelties I picked up on clearance the year before, some of it is just old stuff I cleaned out of the pantry. I'm always sickened and delighted with their disgusting concoctions. 

I remember as kids how we used to make "witches brew" in the bathroom sink, mixing a little bit of everything we could get our hands on. A lot of it was benign like shaving cream and toothpaste, but we mixed in all sorts of cleaning products too.  I can't believe we didn't gas ourselves.  It might be possible we were smart enough not to mix in anything with a Mr. Yuk sticker, more likely we were just lucky. These jars are a lot nastier looking than anything we ever made, but probably a lot safer.  I say probably because I think at some point organic material fermenting in a closed container becomes a bomb, especially the ones that contain dried beans.  We don't keep those around very long.

On the far left is a galaxy bottle.  I love the pumpkin puke. Pumpkin guts are my husband's kryptonite, just the smell is enough to make him gag.  I don't think whoever made this knows that, but that's what it made me think of.  The label on the right is from spookshows.com. 

 

 

 I admire the usage of our eye craft on the bottles below, the earthworm tie cracks me up.   

 

 

The bottle on the left contains among other stuff large pearl tapioca and soba noodles which both look pretty repulsive, I highly recommend them. What is that awesome looking black substance on the middle bottle you ask? I made some galaxy slime (liquid starch & glue), in black, purple and plain white.  After sitting in a container for a few days it all turned black or maybe the black slime ate the other colors.  Remember Stephen King's "The Raft"?  I made the slime to go in the bottles, but you can't trust kids to use things for their intended purpose.  Which is great, because it turns out it's pretty awesome on the bottles too.  That's a plastic ant on the lid and the then the slime was laid over the top and it oozed down the sides a bit before hardening.  Genius.

 

 

These lovely concoctions contain various combinations of Spanish moss, slime, noodles, tapioca and rubber worms.  That bottom one got me.  The worm was lurking beneath the surface and jumped up when I moved the jar. 

  

These were left behind and no has claimed them so I tried copying the ant jar. The bat and skull were cut off plastic rings.  I hot glued them on, and some moss to the top of the jar in the back and topped them off with slime. Next time I'll leave the glitter out of the slime, I thought it detracted from the overall effect. 

   

The adults were more into making jar lanterns this year. Here's the tutorial that we more or less followed, they have silhouettes you can download.  The cat and zombie are from Dave Lowe, the owl is from pixabay.com, the pumpkins are from free-illustrations.gatag.net and the tree is from Viktoria Lyn.

We've been doing glitter bottles the last couple of years. They're so pretty and sparkly and mesmerizing...Anyway we did some of those, but we did some new stuff too.  

 

We made galaxy jars which consist of layering colored water and cotton balls, with a few sprinklings of glitter. I had no idea we'd go through so many cotton balls and we used small bottles. For these and the glitter jars, those single serve plastic wine bottles are great.  The big bag of cotton balls I bought was not even close to being enough.  My neighbor went home and got hers and another friend that was coming later picked up a few bags on the way. We easily went through 600+ cotton balls. Another thing to keep in mind, they don't stay pretty forever, even if you really pack in the cotton balls the colors still muddy together. We do have one bottle that still looks good, but I think it was made with the glitter glue solution.  It warrants further experimentation. There are so many tutorials out there for this but I like this one and I'm intrigued about the diaper method, maybe next year.  One last note I picked up an 18 pack of Wilton squeeze bottles, with a craft store coupon you can't beat the price and they work great for both the glitter glue solutions and colored water.

In my search for galaxy jars I found this tutorial which mixes baby oil with colored water.  I wasn't too keen on using baby oil, even if it does smell like freshly squeezed babies. And I definitely wasn't crazy about the idea of cleaning up an oil slick in the house if things went wrong.  Then there's the issue of poor labeling.  Maybe it's just me, but how do you even tell if they used free range babies? Were they organically breast fed? Cold pressed? Is it even a 100% baby oil? I don't know, I just bought the cheapest bottle and hoped for the best. I used a Wilton squeeze bottle for the baby oil too for ease of use. And then it happened again, unscripted creativity...

...someone added glitter and it is the coolest thing ever! The glitter sticks to the baby oil. It reminds me of mercury the way it moves, or the terminator from T2. The finer the glitter, the cooler the effect. FYI, the far left bottle contains a jelly fish.

Below is a bottle I did with contrasting colors.  I think red glitter would look even better, like alien blood or black water with silver mica powder. 

 

 

A few other things, pine cone spider, avocado head, and

 

 

steampunk foam bats.

 

And here are a few of the dishes people brought

 

 

 

I made the obligatory rat and eyeballs.  I tried a few new recipes, some were gruesome flops, some semi-flops and a couple that turned out as expected.  I'll post recipes for the good ones like Alien Fish Eggs later.  

 

So that's what we did.  Thanks to everyone who helped make this another successful year. 

Toxic Waste Spill

This was inspired by the tutorial for Goldie's Toxic Waste Barrels. I also used a 'Warning Label Generator' listed in the comments, but that appears to be defunct now.

My "barrels" are only six inches tall, so my project is on much, much smaller scale and I don't have any cool fog.

The containers are from some free samples my husband received, sorry he wasn't impressed with the product, so I can't recommend even if the lids kind of have that radioactive sign look to them. I had considered using round Quaker Oat containers before I ended up with these. 

I started out thinking radioactive toxic waste, but for some reason the lids got me thinking of the Umbrella Corp logo, so I colored the opposite panels with red Sharpie. I also decided to go with Resident Evil viruses for the labels, which I realize look nothing like this. I'm not really going for authenticity here, the labels are barely visible in the finished project anyway.  Like I said I can't find the label generator I used but here are the labels I made.

The tutorial I referenced has everything you need to know to make your own toxic barrels, but here are a few pictures of what I did.

Here are all the components arranged on a piece of cardboard.  I sketched an outline on the cardboard of each piece, because I forgot things if I turn around too fast. 






This is a Yogi Tea box modified with craft sticks to look like a crate.  I covered it with a couple of layers of tissue paper with a 1:1 ratio glue and water mixture. 

Here's everything painted black, the crates and cardboard received some accent dry brushing to look a little like wood.  The labels have been applied and lights taped into place.  One nice thing about Christmas merchandise in the stores in August is buying lights for Halloween props.  There are more choices online, but I was already at the hardware store getting Great Stuff. I wanted green lights with a fade switch and there they were. 


If I were to do this again I would have two strands, one on 'Steady' and the other on 'Fade'. The original tutorial uses multiple strands but I thought it would be overkill for my little thing, I was wrong.  This type of project needs that constant light, with a pulsing over glow to give it the right effect. 

Here it is with the spray foam insulation.  I guess you can never have too much oozing slime, but I think I went a little heavy with the Great Stuff.  There is a learning curve to using Great Stuff and I'm not quite there.  I do know air temperature affects how much it expands and patience is a virtue. Here I was so focused on making sure all the wires were covered that I kept spraying on more when I should have been waiting a few seconds to see how much it was going to expand.


I brushed on acrylic paints, but that didn't go so well, it beaded up on the foam and pooled in the crevices. I had to keep brushing it around until it dried. I would recommend using a primer before painting.  I haven't gotten around to using a sealant, but that's next on the agenda. 

Here's a peek inside the wide canister, that's where the battery pack is hidden.