Eyeball Flowers & Textured Vases

I've been making a conscious effort not to give into the commercialism of Halloween and I just don't need more stuff.

I did fantasize about doing a minimalist home display that would involve a giant clown I saw looming menacingly at the Spirit store and a bunch of helium filled red balloons staked all over the yard. But I really don't want a clown that would spend most of the year hiding in my basement.

There was this clown too, my daughter jokingly asked if it was a Roomba.  It's a good thing it isn't otherwise I would be tempted to buy one for every room in the house, so I could have a complete fleet of creepy cleaning clowns.  Which would result in the kids needing therapy, an end to my marriage and my never being able to fall asleep again.

Anyway Halloween is almost at an end, and all I bought was a baby octopus skeleton (Come on, it's not even humanly possible to resist that.) and some black flowers from Target.  And from their landfill fodder bins that I normally walk right past, at that.

Eyeball flowers seem to be trending this season, they are even selling them at the local grocery store, but most of them look pretty lame.

The Target flowers caught my eye because of their wonderful eyelash potential. The flowers themselves have a nice velvety texture.

Making eyeballs that don't look lame is actually really easy.  I used glass gems, the kind they sell as vase fillers.  Make sure you get clear ones without an iridescent finish.  Then simply mod podge an iris image onto the flat side.  I love these from Orestes Graphics.  I highlighted the lashes before gluing the eyes in, painters tape helped keep the petals out of the way.


The vases are Method bottles that have been revamped from a previous project.

Even if I can't appreciate the look, I do sympathize with people who can't help but bedazzle everything in sight. I want to add textures and paint to everything,  it's a sickness.

On the small center vase I used textured tinfoil, I have information on that process here.  The  larger vases are textured using the following technique:

First a layer of tissue paper to give everything something to stick to, then sewing thread randomly wrapped around.  I used mesh tape (for drywall repair) to keep the thread from slipping.  I like the mesh tape because it has it's own interesting texture so if you don't completely hide it, it doesn't matter.  

Trying not to move the thread, gently apply texture paste (paint/gesso, joint compound/spackle, glue/mod podge) randomly over the bottle.  

Then stretch out spider webbing over the texture paste.

This a sample piece, the black and white contrast shows the texture a little better.  I really love this effect.

This is some trim from an old shirt of my daughter.

And this is what it looks like on a bottle.  Below is how it looks with paint which consists of a base coat of black followed by sponging on DecoArt Dazzling Metallics* in Renaissance Brown, Festive Green, Teal and Champagne Gold.

*I'm only name dropping products, because I really like their line of metallics compared to others I have used.

Creepster Easter Felting

I realize I'm running late on the  Easter posts, but Easter starting it by being late this year.  Truth be told, I still have a few Easter or Creepster projects to finish so don't judge.  Or judge, I don't really care, it's my blog and if I want to do Easter in July, I will.

My first contribution is Bunny Cthulhu, isn't he adorable?  

I really like needle felting, it doesn't take a whole lot to get started, a felting needle, some wool roving, a surface to felt on and the desire to do a lot of stabbing.

They make brush mats for felting or you can use foam. I bought an inexpensive upholstery foam remnant from Joann.  My local store has a bin in the back full of remnants.  The piece I got was big enough to cut into plenty good sized blocks to share when I have friends over.  The three inch thickness is probably overkill, but I like it.  Most blocks sold specifically for felting seem to be 2 inches.

I started out with a single needle a friend gave me.  That's how they get you addicted you know.  It just takes one needle.  And I did a lot with that one needle, but needles dull or break and it is useful to have different sizes and types.  I have a set like this that I really like.

My experience in buying wool roving is limited to local craft stores and farmers markets.  The chain stores all carry the same stuff.  Literally the same exact product, just with their store brand on the packaging.  Yorkshire Rose Farm is a vendor at one our local markets and they always have a wide variety of colors and wools, including curly locks.  The one mistake I've made is accidentally buying Merino wool.  It's very smooth and silky so it's better for welt felting than needle felting, but it can also be used for hair/fur.  There's ton's of info on all the different breeds and how the different wools felt up but I've found Romney seems to be the most readily available for needle felting.

For wet felting all I use is bubble wrap and a dish towel. I don't do a lot of wet felting but it's useful for thin pieces.  Since I just make small embellishments I start with needle felting to set the fibers in place before wet felting.  I believe any type of wool can be wet felted.

The best part of needle felting is all the stabbing.  Occasionally I have friends over for Stabby Night, it's very therapeutic.  Now kids, you shouldn't drink and stab, but we do.  That's also why I keep band aids and Neosporin in my stabby kit.

Unfortunately the worst part of needle felting is also all the stabbing.  There comes a point where all the angst leaves your body and your hand starts to cramp.  It does help to only stab as deep as necessary.  If you stab through your project and push the fibers out the other side, you then have to stab them back in, which is just more work. Only stab with the barbed part of the needle, going deeper doesn't get you anything, except maybe hand cramps.  

I also want to give a shout out to a club that just opened up this year, Crucible.  They host a wide variety of events that you are not going to find at your local sports bar.  Every Sunday afternoon it's Dark Arts & Crafts (and Games).  There's no cover and you can bring projects to work on or play games.  I love that a club supports us crafty folks by offering up their space so we can carry out our craft addictions.  As much as I love hosting Stabby Nights, having a place to meet up with friends is pretty wonderful too and it's because of Dark Arts & Crafts that I got these two projects done.

I would have more felting done, but my friend sidetracked me with Pysanky eggs (that'll be another post).  She got quite a few of us addicted and the Crucible has been very supportive of our large group of egg people and helping us get enough tables to set up.  I can't say enough how awesome they are.

It's hard to take pictures of the felting process, because the urge to just keep stabbing is so great.  My first felting post, and my zombie bunny felting one have a little more info on felting.  The Bunny Cthulhu basics are as follows:

• two balls one for the head, one for the body
• two wings,  first needle felted for general shape, then wet felted, then needle felted to polish the edges and add detail
• two ears, basically the same as wings with less detail work
• five tentacles that started out as three logs, alternating needle stabbing with rolling them like clay to shape them, cut the logs in half, the sixth piece can be used as an appendage on something else

Attach the head to body by adding some loose wool between the two and stabbing.  Attach the tentacles by layering loose wool, the cut end of the tentacles, and more loose wool onto the face.  Stab the loose wool into a pleasing (or nightmarish) shape around the tentacles to hold in place.  Stab in details with small balls of felt such as black soulless eyes or dark pink beauty marks.

A couple years ago I felted a few creepy eggs, one of which was an eyeball.  I wanted to make another one, just a little bit fancier this time.

See flowers, that's fancy right?  

It's not very egg shaped from the sides because of how I built up the eyelids.  

The vines are made by rolling small amounts of wool roving into tiny strands before felting them on.  You can keep adding more wool overlapping the ends to make the vines as long as you'd like.  I roll the wool down the top of my thigh. I like wearing jeans or pants with a bit of texture for this.  If you want tighter vines get them wet with soapy water and then roll and twist.  Either way, always work in the same direction.  The flowers are little balls, the leaves are little mice turd shaped rolls.  Using a finer felting needle for these details helps a lot.  

Couldn't resist asking my favorite zombie hand to model my new eyeball egg.  

Modifed Ouija Planchette

Recently my daughter and her friends have begun dabbling in the occult.  Maybe I should be concerned about hell and damnation, but I'm just happy to see them put their phones away.  By some miracle they either don't know there are Ouija apps or they don't care.  If I had known all a board game needed was a little mysticism to attract this kind of attention, I would've claimed my Pente board had divination powers.  I just might try that yet.

For a while they used a Ouija board made out of paper and cardboard.  But we are now officially owners of an overpriced piece of chipboard and a hunk of plastic.

I was a little disappointed that it didn't come with any ominous rules, the girls already knew all the basics, but it still would have been fun to see them in print.  On the back of the box it does give some cheesy examples of what to ask, "Will my parents let me go to the concert? What should I wear?"  That's where I put my foot down and told them under no uncertain terms were they going to open a portal to hell just to find out what they should wear.

The board isn't horrible.  It's pretty sturdy, the graphics are still the William Fuld design.  The planchette on the other hand is the most boring shade of beige plastic imaginable. Probably the only kind of spirit you could attract with it would be one that would want to do your tax returns.  I guess that wouldn't be so bad, unless being on the other side of the veil transposes numbers, then you'd have a hard time explaining that one to the IRS.

Well I decided no daughter of mine was going summon malevolent spirits or be possessed by evil demons using institutional beige accessories.

First step is to remove the clear plastic piece.  Cover the planchette with Mod Podge, but not inside the ring.  Then add a single layer of tissue paper.  Notice I laid it right across the opening. Apply Mod Podge to outside edges of the planchette and fold the tissue over it.  Gently pat it all down.  You can pull the excess tissue paper off along the wet edge.

Design and make embellishments.  I won't lie. This part actually took me a while, which is a little ridiculous when the end product was a fairly simple design. But I changed my mind about a billion times before I got there. So I have this whole slew of twisted wire bits to adorn bottles at the next craft party.  All wire bits were hammered between two metal blocks. Just enough to make sure they would lay flat not enough to flatten the wire itself.

I used 18 gauge wire, but you could use a thin cord or small metal filigrees. I've even seen where people make awesome swirly designs with hot glue, although all I can do with a glue gun is make gloppy messes with lots of stringies.  The eye is from one of the local craft stores, but I can't remember which one. It came on a strand with five more just like it.

Glue the pieces in place and let dry.

I covered everything with Mod Podge except for the now covered opening, and the eye charm.  Again I used a single layer of tissue paper, covering everything including the eye.  I applied more Mod Podge and added on more lay one more layer, making sure to push into all the crevices around the wire and around the edge of the eye charm.  I slit the paper covering the eye and pushed it down around the eye piece. I added a small piece of tissue paper above and below the eye to flesh it out a little more and coated it in Mod Podge.

Once it was dry I trimmed around ring to make sure there was no tissue paper in the opening, otherwise the clear plastic piece wont fit. I painted it all black, including the inner ring and underneath.  After that dried I sponged on dark brown and metallics in brown, copper and gold. Any paint that I got on the eyeball I wiped off with a damp clean paintbrush.

Aside from me spending way more time than I should have making a few wire curlicues, this was a quick project and ended up looking way cool.  I'm sure all the really cool spirits will be hanging out at our house.

"My Ouija brings all the souls to the yard,
 And they're like, its better than yours,
 Damn right, its better than yours..."

...sorry, been spending too much time around teens lately.  

I also bought my daughter Ouija Board Nightmares: Terrifying True Tales.  It starts with a little mysterious history of the Ouija board, but it's mostly very short urban legend type stories.  There were quite a few stories about kids at sleepovers or parties just messing around with the Ouija and then...So absolutely perfect for the target audience at our abode.

Maybe they'll get into tarot cards next.  I would love to have a set of these Twin Peaks cards.

Craft Party 2017

At the party someone asked me how many years I've been doing this and I couldn't remember off the top of my head.  Going back through old photos I realized this was our 10th year of official organized Halloween crafting. I guess I missed the opportunity to have a "10th Anniversary" party.  I can't believe I've gotten away with inflicting my addiction onto my friends for an entire decade.

The one thing you can count on every year is me not getting pictures of everything. This year I totally outdid myself and took crappy pictures besides.  I apologize to everyone who's creations look less than what they are due to my sorry photography.

It wouldn't be a Halloween craft party without potion bottles. 
There were glittery potions,

...disgusting concoctions,

...and just plain spooky bottles, 

 

Flowers might not seem spooky until you realize
that's a pile of bones at the bottom of the jar.

...and new this year, creepy bottles inspired by Russian crafters. Not that the Russian's are the only one's doing this, but more often then not I find myself on Russian craft sites.  You can check out my Craft Party 2017 pinterest board to see a few examples or search on "altered bottles".  This is what we came up with.

 

The best and worst thing about these bottles is you can use almost anything.  Sometimes having limitless choices can be a bit daunting, but this is a great way to use up odd bits of stuff.  These bottles used a variety of tissue paper, netting, twine, cord, beaded garland, old or broken jewelry, beads, glass gems, shells, dried lentils & seeds, faux flowers, and plastic critters & bones.  I am happy to see my salt dough skulls and wire components I made practicing with a wire jig finally getting used for something. 

Vampire Blood and Life Renewal labels courtesy of Love Manor. 

There were more fashionista skeletons this year.  I think the outfits were even more elaborate than last year if that's possible.  This a great way to use up fabric scraps and old Barbie clothes.  Nothing goes with gold pants like a Madonna style bustier and although it's hard to tell, the gal next to her is pregnant will a smaller rubber skeleton.  Congratulations, I guess?  

I like this bottle cap & cork top hat.  

Another great hat and who doesn't like furry gogo boots?

What this guy lacks in fashionable attire he makes up for with his interesting array of friends.  Bonus points for using a leftover piece of fence from an old project as a ladder to stand on (can't see in this picture).

There were also skeletons in jars.  Which is a nice way to display your favorite skelly, like this mermaid from last year's party.

A couple of our younger patrons came up with these jar ideas. 

The pictures don't do them justice, but I loved them so much I had to make my own.  I really like how the water doesn't cover the skeleton. I imaged it was low tide with the sea foam (sesame seeds) swirling around him.  I couldn't get the right sea levels on mine and ended up filling the jar.  Another nice thing about using jars, is the skeleton is protected. I had to snap a few joints to get mine posed right. They aren't broken all the way through, but they definitely wouldn't survive long if he was being man handled.  There was some leftover chain with tiny medallions that I piled up to look like treasure.  You can't take it with you, but that doesn't stop some from trying. 

This was a plastic bendy skeleton, partially spray painted. I like the two-face effect. You have to be careful when using spray paint on plastic, even if it's paint & primer or it says it's specifically for plastic. He's one of those plastics that doesn't play well with spray paint and as a result he will be forever sticky, but he looks so dementedly cool.  I'd be curious to see him sprinkled with black sand or glitter on the sticky bits for a little texture.

Here are some silhouette lantern jars.  Lightly spray painted in the inside and designs copied on the outside with black paint pens.  I'm glad to see more salt dough skulls finding a purpose.  I wish I wouldn't have tried to get the skulls into the first picture because it's not a good view of the four cats below.  The cat clipart can be found at ClipArtQueen. The "Eek" is from TheDiyVillage. The owl I found at FaveCrafts and the other cat is on pinterest.

One last creation is this Lost City. 

I forgot the actual name, but it's not Atlantis, because that's underwater.  

And now for the only reason my husband comes up from the basement while all this is going on, the food.

People brought some awesome goodies.  Monsters & mummies, spidery treats and other creepy delights.  There was a really pretty fall decorated cake, but I didn't think to take a picture until after I had already hacked it to pieces.  Seriously I shouldn't be allowed to cut cake, ever.

I have to admire these spider cookies, because I too once fell for the old “use a toothpick to drag out ‘legs’ from melted choc chips” and mine didn't turn out nearly as well as these.  There is a whole story about the photoshopped cookie that's plastered across the internet and has led to millions of chocolate chip cookies being decimated by toothpicks. 

I have zucchini up the wazoo this year, which is slightly more uncomfortable than it sounds.  So I might have made a few things with zucchini.  I'll post recipes later.  

I made Candied Lizard Skin (left) with one of my neighbors regular green zucchini and Frog Skin (right) with some of mine.  I should explain that mine is of the 8 ball variety, which as the name suggests is round and should be picked when it's about the size of an 8 ball.  This year my zucchini is having an identity crisis and has been more yellow than green.  

I also saved the syrup they were cooked in because it was bright green and purty.  I poured it into a beaker and set it by the food.  Halfway through the party I hear, "Mom can I drink this green stuff?" After I said yes I hear a bunch of others say, "Ooh I want to try it too!"  It wasn't until they had all tried it that I told them it was zucchini syrup.  Yeah, I'm a special kind of evil.

Alien Zucchini Ball

These are chocolate zucchini cake pops.

Since I had candy melts in other colors than the usual red and green, I decided to go for a bruised, decaying rat look. It ended up looking more like tie dye rat. 

And then I dropped the mold before I had poured the bottom, which wouldn't have been a total disaster, except this was "fancy rat" with raspberry blood, so it totally cracked and started to ooze. I sealed the bottom by laying it on top of a pool of melted red candy melts.  My husband had a great idea of adding more red candy blood to cover the cracks, which probably would've looked really good, but I think eating wise would've been too much candy melt.

Everyone at the party was very polite and lied and said my rat looked great and the cracks added character.

I do like how the raspberry blood oozed from the nostrils.
Too bad I would never be able to recreate that in a million years.  

I still had leftover purple and green melts so I decided to make Crunchy Beetle cookies in honor of Glenda Glinka:Witch-At-Large, one of my favorite books as kid. She's a bored witch who decides to amuse herself by turning into a little girl.  She's not sure what "PTA" cookies are so she decides to make her favorites in purple and green with lots of beetles.  I didn't actually want to bake anything so I dipped Oreo cookies and topped them with chocolate covered pecan roaches. 

One last thing just for fun.  I don't really decorate for the party.  Generally anything I display is a past project for inspiration or guidance.  Any other macabre stuff has probably been there all year.  The exception to that is the bathroom.  I saw this on Halloween Forum  and I knew I had to do it.

I used about 100 roaches.  Most of them are behind the door so people don't notice them right away.  There are a few strategically placed near where people would normally touch things like the light switch. Roaches are truly the gift that keeps on giving.  They freak people out even after they know they are there.  Roaches are magical that way. 

I use Loctite Fun Tak Mounting Putty. It comes cleanly off painted walls and does a great job holding the roaches. The only downside is it's blue and you can definitely see it from an angle, but trust me that's not what people see first. I did try Scotch Clear Mounting Squares, but they weren't strong enough.

And so that's what happened. I want to thank everyone for helping me make this a success year after year.