Repurposed Coffin Case

My husband recently bought a secondhand guitar and had no interest in using the coffin case that came with it.  He was thinking about selling it until he saw the gleam in my eye, and I'm not going to lie probably a little drool, when I saw the black coffin with red velvet interior.

Before I eviscerated it, I got my skeleton out and tried a few poses to make sure it would be truly useful as a prop.

Gutting it was easy, the storage area was just a lid with a screw on each side and a couple of staples. There was also a little velvet covered bump for the other end of the lid to rest on.  For the moment I left the bump where it was at.

The middle hump was easy to remove it was just a velvet covered piece of styrofoam glued to the bare wood.  When I say velvet I actually mean velvet material quilted to a thin layer of foam batting.

Removing this left me with a bare spot in the middle and two slits in the velvet trim on either side.

There was no way I could have done a perfect patch job, the top and bottom were two separate pieces that where not quite lined up. But if I had wanted to spend the time to make this as seamless as possible I would have pulled up about a half inch of the velvet along both sides of the bare spot.  Then I would have trimmed the foam backing about a quarter inch so that it was a straight line and tucked the velvet material underneath the edge of the foam.  Then I would have continued on with the following, except my patch piece would have had to be precisely sized with all the foam removed from the velvet tucked underneath.

But I figured I could still make it look pretty darn good in half the time. First I removed any remaining glue with a razor blade.  Then I cut a cereal box to the shape I wanted.  I made it a little longer to cover the jagged edges of the velvet already in place and little narrower in width to accommodate the width of the velvet and foam batting.

I covered the cardboard with materiel I peeled off the styrofoam.  Hot glue is my least favorite bonding material to work with, but for this project it was perfect.

I still had the two side slits to contend with.   Trying to fix them with more velvet seemed foolhardy, so I decided to cover them with ribbon trim.  I used a wide faux leather ribbon, trimmed with sparkly fringe (Clearance purchase for the win!).   Since I thought it would look weird to just have it in two spots,  I evenly spaced strips of ribbon around the whole coffin.  

That meant I could remove the little bump at the top and cover the glue stain without it looking out of place.

The outside vinyl was torn in a couple places.  I colored the wood underneath with black sharpie, glued the vinyl back down with E6000 and used strapping taping to hold it flat while it dried. The final step was to replace the screws that had held the storage lid with much shorter screws so I didn't have to fix the holes.

I'm happy with how it turned out and it didn't take all day.  And now I have a cute coffin prop.  No, it's not big enough to actually fit a skeleton, but visually it does the trick and it's not as unwieldly as a full size prop.  It stores easily and has it's own carrying handle, which makes it pretty perfect for me.

Last year for Halloween on a whim I made my skelly dog a headbanger.  I already have a punk vulture and I've been meaning to do the same for my skelly frogs.  I have needle felted green liberty spikes for the big one and I'm working on some crazy red Johnny Rotten hair for the smaller one.  I just have to rock out my regular skeleton and I think I've got a band.

Needle Felted Monster Cactus

A long, long, long time ago Lady M asked me how long it takes to make one of these felty things and I had no idea.  This is the one project where I actually paid attention to the time.   In total, it took three hours, that included snacks, drinks, chatting and moving the eyeballs three or four times.

All you see here took an hour and a half and most of that was spent on the details.  Making the flower took the rest of the time because I felted each petal individually and it's harder to needle felt thin flat objects.  Sometimes wet felting is a better option for thin pieces but you do have to wait for them to dry.

Size wise you can see what three hours got me.  There's a trade off with size, obviously the larger an object the more stabbing that's involved.  But it's easier to do the detail work, which gets fussier the smaller you go.

This is what he would look like with flaming red curly locks.

I should say for safety purposes you should never needle felt distracted, angry or under the influence.  The needles are very sharp.   That being said, we generally have cocktails on Stabby Nights and on this particular night we had Raspberry Mimosas which were quite yummy and as a bonus I now have this awesome bottle to use for potions.  

The inspiration for this cactus came from Woolbuddies.  I don't have any experience with the kits, but the book is awesome and I think the style is easy for beginners to pick up.  Many of my stabby friends started out making the simpler Woolbuddy creatures.  There are a few how-to videos that are worth checking out.  The frog and the penguin are favorite among my friends.   

Mini Creepmas Frames

This Creepmas I saw a few different references to the lovely ornaments at Me and Annabel Lee.

While mine are nothing like those, I rather like theirs better, they were the inspiration for me to finally use these mini frames I picked up at a garage sale years ago.  My frames are approximately 5x7cm, outside dimensions, so perfectly suited for my tiny Creepmas tree.

The frames where already dark in color, highlighted in bronze but they were too shiny and perfect.  It made the metal frames look like plastic.  I covered them with a flat black and randomly highlighted the raised areas.  I also added some rhinestones, clearance purchase of course. Even the black ribbon was bought on clearance, thrifty down to the last.

I went with what I consider to be Creepmas images.  The image of the vintage creepy Santa is all over the internet.  As is the dapper owl, who in my mind looks perfectly attired for Victorian holiday festivities.  The skeleton child with her goat seems very Yuletide to me and this altered image is by Kelloween.

And on the subject of Yule goats, I really love the goats in this video.  

Creepmas Cookies

I said I was going to try making Yeti cookies and I did, but it wasn't quite the effort I put into the Krampus ones. The kids had their cookies to decorate and I had to make some "normal" ones, so there wasn't a lot left for me to play with. To be a honest my Yeti's are kind of a bust, but I have high hopes of doing better next year. I do like the one in the middle, he turned out pretty cute. For him I used an upside-down snowman cookie cutter.

I tried some mouth/tongues similar to the Krampus with rolled out gumdrops and black sugar. The horns are peppermint candy corns. The center Yeti's nose is a piece of Buncha Crunch, which is a nugget of Nestle's Crunch. If you have low expectations for peppermint candy corns, these will meet those expectations. They also infuse the Buncha Crunch with their lackluster peppermint flavor. But boy do they make cute little festive horns.

Here are some of the kid's cookies, upper right is a gingerbread man bleeding from multiple stab wounds, below that is a Death Snowflake, the candy corn being it's death ray and the skulls and tombstone representing the number of planets it has destroyed. At the very bottom with a candy corn tie is a mobster snowman, and above him is a vampire snowbat with candy corn fangs. They might taste like minty crap, but those candy corns sure are versatile.

Next year I plan on making more ghosts, I like how he turned out with the black skulls for facial features. The coffin on the left is my second one, definitely an improvement compared to the one on the right. Word of advice don't try to edge a coffin in one continuous band of frosting, it almost looks like a flipflop.

Second word of advice, less is more when it comes to color. 

I like the Creepmas garland, but I should have made it with fewer colors.

This was going to be a Yeti and somehow it ended up as an angry Yule goat. 

I think I need more of these next year too.

And more unicorn snowbat creatures, with bone arms.

I thought these bats were cute too.

And just to play fair I made holly with a bat cookie.
It would probably look more like holly if I had bothered to make green frosting. 

I used my usual recipe for the cookies and frosting. I don't believe I've ever made buttercream frosting in advance, but time constraints necessitated it this year. I just let it come to room temp and whipped it again before using. It was kind of nice not having the mess of making frosting on top of the mess of decorating cookies, I don't know why I've never done this before.

Another thing I liked this year, and maybe this has been around for a while and I'm just finally noticing, was the little $1 packets of holiday sprinkles at Michaels. It was nice buying a variety of holiday cheer in reasonable amounts that will get used up in the next two years.