From The Depths of the Deep Blue Sea

It's about time I finished this bottle, which I started back at the last craft party.  The contents were done, but I didn't like the lid.  I could've just painted it black and called it a day, but I had a vision and sometimes those bastards are persnickety.


I found a nice simple template for the boat at MollyMooCrafts.   I made mine on a much smaller scale of course. Actually I made two, slightly different sizes, because I wasn't sure what I wanted. When cutting out the pieces, instead of cutting all the way around, I left tabs sticking out here and there to aid in the assembly process.  After all the pieces where glued in place and dried, I set the boats on top of the lid and there they sat.  For a really long time.  A really, really long time, in a slightly mocking manner.

See, being made out of printer paper they were too thin and flimsy to just paint. And the thought of reinforcing their teeny tiny little hulls with paper mache seemed torturous. So they sat.  That is until The Great Nerf War of 2018. 

An epic battle some say, even though the only casualty was a living room wall.  Since I had to get everything out to patch a hole, I decided to also tackle the Father Vs Son WWF Match dent and the Ninja Sneak Attack dings.  The thing is, I live with animals, but as a result I've become a bit of a drywall repair goddess.  So there's that.

When it comes to drywall stuff and paint, I never work out of the original containers, I always just take out a little more than I think I'll.  So after everything had been repaired, I had a little bit of this and a little bit of that leftover.  I felt bad about just tossing it, so I mixed it all together.  It was maybe (didn't measure) 3 parts all-in-one primer paint, which is really thick and creamy, to which I had added some sand texture, 1 part joint compound and just a smidge of fiber reinforced compound.  Well it was all consolidated in one container now, but what to do with it? And there were those two little boats staring at me.

Well it turns out this stuff was perfect for little boats. 6 thin coats, inside and out and my little boats are nice and sturdy, with a uniform thickness I wouldn't have been able to achieve with papier mache.  On a few passes I scraped the side of the brush against the top edge of the boats to make a thick ridge.


The fabric draped over the lid and used for the sail came from my daughter's old mermaid costume.  Sometimes it pays to know someone who's been through a princess phase.  I've been using pieces of her worn to death costumes for years.  They have layers of different textured fabrics that have come in handy more than once.  This piece is some kind of synthetic satiny material. For the sail I distressed it by setting a toothpick on fire, blowing it out and using the glowing embers to burn tiny holes in it.  I started out using an open flame on the pieces hanging over the lid but that was too hard to control, stuff burns like crazy. Which leads me to realize how lucky we were that her "Princess, Sponge Bob, Jellyfish, Snake & Worm Party"*, full of princess garbed little girls, didn't play out like a scene from The Towering Inferno.

*That's the kind of stuff you end up with when you ask five year olds what they want to do for their birthday.

Continuing on, the mast is a toothpick with a few small beads on top, and is set into a small grommet.  The "water" is glue, fabric and tissue paper.  There's a little bit of cheesecloth down the sides.

If I were to do this again I would start with the lid and then add the contents.  As it was I had to cover the jar in painters tape, and keep it upright so as not to jostle the stuff inside.  I was too scared to take the lid of and work on it separately.  Things have grown in there since last year.  I can only imagine the aroma that would ensue from opening that jar. I do love the murky effect.  Yes for once that's not just crappy photography on my part, that haziness has been organically grown.  There's even an interesting line of rusty colored growth.

I rather like the idea of my pirate, decomposing next to his treasure, looking up from the murky depths of the ocean floor, contemplating whether or not it was worth it.

Halloween Flamingos

My original vision was two dozen flamingos strewn across the front yard in various stages of demise. Decapitated, gut shot, rotting, tortured plastic flesh, pink flamingo carnage as far as the eye could see with a few flamingo cenobites thrown in to instill order. 

But I felt the kids were too young to see mommy hacking away at little pink bodies and I didn’t know how well those little plastic bodies would respond to the kind of treatment I had in mind. Instead I purchased only a half dozen flamingos from eBay, for a very reasonable price, if you don’t mind not having authentic Featherstone’s and outfitted them with very tame Halloween costumes that the kids came up with based on their interests at the time.

My only complaint is the legs don’t stay put. I don't know if this is just a problem with the knock-offs, I'm not really a flamingo connoisseur. The wire legs were always popping out of the slots molded into the plastic. So I ended up gluing mine in, but then they take more space to store. One of them had a defect, we’ll talk about him later. 

I had two criteria for the costumes. One was to use stuff on hand and the other was to use materials that would hold up to the cold and the rain.

I'll explain the least obvious accessories like Indiana Jones’ jacket, which is made from a child’s pirate costume boot cover.  

His lasso is a rope, the handle is what I call a modified noose, but I’m sure there is real name for it. 

My dad passed on a wealth of knowledge to me, such as don’t get any jailhouse tattoos and don’t steal anything that’s not worth going to prison for. I’m sensing a pattern here. He also taught me how to make a noose.  No context, just an out of the blue, come here kid and let me show you something father and daughter bonding moment. It's because of my warped childhood that I’m always surprised at how many people don’t know how to make a noose, so let me enlighten you if you don't already know. 

It’s really very easy and handy for decorating. No, not for Better Homes and Gardens, but definitely for stringing up a skeleton or two for Halloween. Never, never ever, ever ever, (Is that Taylor Swift singing in the background?), never, ever, never put a noose around any living creature. Not for just a second, not to be funny, not because your inner child wants to clean the gene pool. It’s not cool.

That being said, here’s a video that shows you just how easy it is. I’ve heard it’s illegal to make a noose, that a hangman’s noose has 13 coils, that 13 is the requisite number to make it big enough to snap a neck after a short drop with a sudden stop, and that the number of coils is why 13 has been deemed an unlucky number (Totally unfounded, nasty rumor, 13 is an awesome number once you get to know it. Now 4 on the other hand seems a little shifty. You don’t hear much about 4, kind of makes you wonder what it’s up too, right?). I have not seen anything factual to give credence to any of those statements, but I think thirteen loops looks good and for macabre decorating is definitely in the spirit of things.

This faux bullwhip is similar to the hangman's noose except just make one loop, wrap it, feed the end of the wrap through the loop and then pull the long end of the rope so the loop pulls tight. No, I don’t actually recommend using a fuchsia jump rope, but you get the idea.

Moving on, the witch's stringy hair is plastic Halloween garland. Her cape or shawl is made out of black pet screen. Pet screen also works for toddlers that like to press up against screen doors. 

Most of the other accessories are made out of craft foam sheets. Here are instructions to make an easy tutu like the ballerina has.  My favorite is the mummy and he's just wrapped in cheesecloth.  I think an army of mummy flamingos would look awesome.

The ghost was the one with the bum leg hole. After numerous fixes I gave up and he floated from a tree for a while and then he was abducted by aliens and this happened.

 

The alien flamingo's eyes are made out of the round plastic toy capsules that come out of quarter machines.  I boiled two halves in water until they were soft, and then wrapped a rubber band around the middle to squeeze them into an oblong shape. Careful they will be hot, so use tongs or thick gloves to hold onto it while wrapping.  Let them cool, and spray paint the inside black.  The edges will need to be trimmed for them to lay against the face.  Trim a little at a time until you get a good fit and then hot glue them on. 

His spaceship is nothing fancy. It's a circle of foam I had, with some cardboard, covered in tinfoil with clear marbles and battery operated micro mini lights glued along the outside edge, covered in plastic wrap for waterproofing. It looks pretty good for a 15 minute project with the lights twinkling and reflecting off the wrap, marbles and tinfoil.

Best part, nobody questions why he doesn't have any legs. 

By the way if you're thinking, "But wait tinfoil and aliens don't mix.", you should probably check out this site, the old tinfoil hat isn't nearly as effective as you may have been led to believe.

Next step is to make papier mache flamingo clones, then I can do all sorts of dastardly things to them.

This has nothing to do with Halloween, more to do with Home Owner Associations and is possibly the best lawn flamingo story ever written.  Most importantly it makes me chuckle, enjoy A Flock of Lawn Flamingos by Pat Murphy.