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.

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. 

Witch Finger Coffin

In the coffin is a witch's finger.  The only clue to who she was is the picture on the front, courtesy of the Graphics Fairy by the way.

This is one of those projects that's been a decade in the making.  I made this finger ages ago during a Girl Scout outing.  The girls earned their pottery badge at a place that uses a wood fired kiln, which was pretty cool to learn about.

While the girls were making their pottery, I spotted this discarded little log of clay.  I can't take much credit for making this finger, because it was practically a finger before I even picked it up.  I formed the nail bed and added the fingernail and a few knuckle lines, but that's it.  I painted it with acrylics after firing.

All this time I've had this finger, waiting for inspiration to strike with a creative way to display it.

The coffin was an after Halloween clearance purchase.  It wasn't very exciting, so the first step was to fancy it up. I found this video and this video by Sage Reynolds on how to line a box with padded velvet to be very useful.  It's definitely worth a run through even if you do like I did and not pad the liner.  Also at some point you are going to want to paint the inside of the coffin.  I suggest using a color similar to your fabric to hide any tiny gaps or imperfections in the finished lining. My fabric was a clearance priced remnant.

Trace the outside of box on paper and then measure in the thickness of the sides to figure out the inside dimension. From there measure out the height of the sides to create the tabs.  I used paper first, to make a template.  It's easier to make adjustments on paper. Keep in mind you do have to make some allowances for the thickness of your final insert and fabric.  I used a cereal box and a thin fabric.  I scored the cardboard so the sides folded up easily.  

Test your insert, trim as needed.  You want it to fit nicely, but not too tight, you'll need room for the width of the fabric.  At the corners where the sides meet you should have just enough gap to accommodate your fabric.  Again mine was thin, so I trimmed just a hair's breadth.

Cut a piece of fabric the size of the insert and glue it down. I normally only use Elmers school glue for papier mache because it's too watery for much else.  Here it's thin consistency was an asset. I was able to apply a very thin, even coat on the insert and the fabric laid across it perfectly smooth.

Once that's dry you can trim around the insert, make sure you leave enough fabric to fold over the edges. I used double-sided sticky tape to keep the folded edges in place.

My liner ended up fitting perfectly snug, so I didn't glue it down. Also I'm fickle and might want to try my hand at a padded liner at some later date. Repeat the above process to line the lid of the coffin.

The next step is to add some dimension to the top of lid. Below is the template I created. This is actually the fourth one I made before I was happy with it. Again working with paper first is a lot easier to fine tune your template.

The red line "B" is the outline of my coffin.  It's important that it's outlined exactly the way it will sit on the top of the coffin. Until I started this process I would've sworn the coffin was symmetrical.  It's not even close.  

The inside line labeled "A" is 3/8 inch in from the red line. 

The outside line "C" is 1/8 inch from the red line. 

The little red lines "D" are drawn perpendicular to lines "B" from the corners. I've denoted the right angles in blue.  

The little black lines "E" are drawn from the corners of line "A" to the points where lines "D" intersect lines "C".  

Cut along lines "C" and "E".  

When you cut out the final piece on cardboard also score along lines "A".  

I hope this all makes sense.     

Tape the corners together and try the template on for size. After I knew these were the exact measurements for the shape I wanted, I went through the whole process on a piece of cardboard instead of tracing the template for a more precise fit.  

To make it a little sturdier I stacked and glued craft sticks, broken to fit down the center underneath. I put glue around the edges and used tape to keep it in place.  After it dries you can papier mache over it.  I chose texture past under a layer of lace, which I scored on my last thrift store excursion.  I may have gone a bit overboard on the decorations, but I stand by creating a raised lid.  It's a nice addition to an otherwise plain cheap coffin.  

The original plan was to do raised scrolls in texture paste, somehow that ended up being random zipper swirls. I daubed a thin texture paste in between the zippers to make the plain cardboard more interesting.  Then I slapped on two coats of black paint, wiping it off the zipper teeth so the metal shines through.  I was going to highlight the different textures, but I thought it would look too busy.  They don't show as well in the pictures, but in person the textures speak for themselves.    

We have a charity thrift store in town where you pay by the pound.  Basically all the stuff that doesn't sell at their main outlets goes there.  All the clothes are in these huge bins that you have to shift through.  I went there years ago with a friend looking for clothing with interesting zippers/buttons. One of the workers kindly pointed out that we were sifting through bins that had been picked over for awhile and pointed where the "newer" stuff was.  Since we were going to destroy anything we bought, it was actually nice to know that we were sifting through the rejects of the rejects.  I didn't spend much and I still haven't used all the items I salvaged.  If you have anything like that in your area I'd check it out.