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.  

Craft Party 2016

This October marked the 9th year of official Halloween craft parties. It's a lot of crazy, but magic happens when you throw a bunch of people in with a bunch of stuff, stir in some glue and sprinkle on a little glitter.  I love seeing everyone feed off each others ideas. It's like being in a vortex of creative energy.

Sadly I didn't get pictures of everything.  I never do, there's so much happening at once, it's hard for me to keep up.

As we do every year, there were potion bottles.  Bottles with labels...

Both this poison label and the one in the first picture are from SpookShows.com. Life Renewal Potion label from Love Manor.

bottles without...

The bottle below is one of my favorites, staring at the line between the light and dark red was like looking off into the horizon of a red alien landscape. 
Someone said it looked like a core sample from Mars. 

Last year we discovered that if you add glitter to a bottle of water
with a little oil in it the glitter sticks to the oil and takes on
a globular life of it's own when you shake it around. 

This bottle is kind of neat because there is too much glitter for the oil to hold,
so it has both the globular effect and loose glitter falling down when shaken. 

We also did lava lamp style bottles, which are a lot of oil
and a little water with alka seltzer tablets thrown in.
I wouldn't recommend adding glitter to these, it ruins the effect.

We used both corn oil and baby oil. 
Corn oil is cheaper, but yellow and baby oil is clear.

This one is pretty as is, but I wish I had a picture of when it was just plain water,
baby oil and silver glitter.  It almost looked like a storm cloud in a bottle. 

This year I made vampire blood.  Which is super cool, green under normal light, but glows red under UV. I used kale as they did in the instructions, but it's noted that anything green and leafy should work.

I have never eaten kale and after this I probably never will. Just blanching it for a minute smelled really bad, like old broccoli and even after pureeing the crap out of it the solid matter was really fibrous. It was not attractive. I'm just mentioning this in case you think you're going to tempt kids over to the dark side of kale by showing them how "cool" it is.  Cool, it is.  Edible, I think not. 

Anyway moving on, what to do with it? I tried lighting the "blood" from within with a submersible UV tea light.  It needed to be watered down so much for the light to come through that the effect is pretty blah.  Pictured above is full strength vamp blood on the left and watered down on the right, being lit from a source outside the containers. It's just a little strobe UV light, so it was hard getting a good picture. 

I kept the fibrous muck after I strained it out, because that stuff is cool too.  The chunky stuff isn't as bright, but this picture still doesn't do it justice. After it dried, it glow a bit less, but still enough to look cool.  Once it dried it didn't stink, it smelled a lot like alfalfa.

You can write or draw with the liquid and that looks cool too, but I don't have pictures.  Again it fades as it dries.  Maybe mixing with an acrylic glaze would help? Definitely need to experiment more. Like these glowing cupcakes from PhotoandGrime.com that use the chlorophyll from mint. Betcha mint smells better than kale.  I wonder if you can make minty vamp blood mojitos? Ok I definitely have to get down to the laboratory.  Igor? Where's an Igor when you need one?

I've been wanting to do papier mache at the party for awhile, but that's not a project that can be finished in a few hours.  So as a compromise, just to get some techniques introduced, we did simple stuff that people could at least get the foundation laid and then paint it on their own once it was dried. Here are some fantastic books my neighbor did. 

Here's a cute little pumpkin and some eyes before painting. Both are done on pieces of cardboard.  The eyes are glass gems over iris printouts from Orestesgraphics.com

And some random glass gems over magazine cutouts. 

I've been wanting to make tampon ghosts for ages, but the kids were so young I held off.  You can't really traumatize them if they don't get the joke.  But now that most them are in middle school, I figure the only thing worse than going through puberty would be tampon crafting with your mom. 

Tampons and I go way back, to when I was in middle school.  You know when dinosaurs roamed the earth and mullets and parachute pants were cool. In all that time I never noticed that they are made up of a bunch of really short fibers that fall apart when you futz with them. It may be unnecessary but I spray them with a little starch for longevity.  A clear acrylic spray would probably work well too. If you would like to read more about tampon construction than you ever really wanted to know check out my tampon angel.

I didn't want to add spraying starch as a parlor game inside my house, so for the party we just dipped them in starch.  A little liquid goes along way, so quick dips. My friend had the genius idea to wet the ends with the watered down glitter glue we had for potion bottles and then took it one step further to drop food coloring on the bottoms and let it wick up. Next time I would skip the starch and go straight to the watery glitter glue or maybe brush starch on the top and glitter glue the bottoms. 

I was inspired by her ghosts to make this tampon Cthulhu,
which I will write up a tutorial for, because everyone should
have a super absorbent Great Old One in their life.

The past few years voodoo dolls have been a party favorite. 
The girls love making fashionable outfits for them, so when I saw these ladies at Grandin Road, I thought we could do a similar thing with mini skeletons.

 They came up with some pretty amazing ideas. 

I was inspired to make this last skeleton while cleaning up after the party.  Scraps of this and that were laid out in such a way that the universe was practically begging for this to be made.  I started off with every intention of making a punk skeleton, but the scraps of pink neon lightning material (I have a friend who makes skate costumes, among other things, who donated some really neat stuff.), had other ideas and wouldn't leave me alone until I resigned to go 80's glam rock.

She's missing an arm because pre-party I played around with posing.  Soaking in boiling hot water was ok for minor manipulation. Snapping joints off and gluing into position looked the best, but leaves the joints very vulnerable, which is fine if you aren't going to mess with it much.  Obviously I messed too much and lost limbs along the way.      

We also made box mummies inspired by these but on a smaller scale.
Even though they look very similar we did things differently enough that I'll write up a separate tutorial. 

We did more foam bats this year too. 
Add a wire and you can stick them with your plants. 

We also made witch jars and other silhouette luminaries. 

No pictures but last year's post has pictures and links to silhouettes we used.

Food.  I'm obligated on penalty of death or at least torture by being tied to the tree of woe and licked by fire kittens to make rat and eyeballs every year. 
This year I went with diseased rat.  He did a fantastic job of oozing raspberry blood, I was very pleased.

I also made cookie dough brains, making the full cookie dough recipe without the cupcakes resulted in about 40 dough balls, which took about 16oz of white chocolate to coat enough molds.  These numbers are approximate because my kitchen is infested with ninja trolls that steal dough balls when I'm not looking. I made intestines, another recipe I'll have to post, and I tried these jalapeno mummy poppers, with a few modifications.  Instead of scallions and garlic, I seasoned them with chipotle powder and instead of salt & pepper I used a chipotle sea salt blend. The jalapeno's were a nice balance to all the sweet stuff. 

Guest contributions included Bat Barf, a meaty queso dip.  I didn't get a picture, but it was very barfy looking.  I did snap a picture of the tag, which makes me giggle, like only emoji barf can do.

On the sweeter side there were eyeballs,

bones,

witches hats and broomsticks,

graveyard cupcakes,

acorns,

and candy corn.

There's also a part that no one else gets to see. When the party's done, when it's quiet, when I can finally process everything...that's when I get some of the best ideas and I owe them all to the wonderful people who choose to share this day with me.