Treasure Chest and Pirate Swag!

I had some left over wood from a recent project, so I turned this chest out in an afternoon! It is made from plywood and stained with a dark mahogany. The lid is curved and from the outside it looks decent, but the gaps on the inside are shoddy at best, but no one but me is going to notice!

This is bare bones and I wish I would have spent some more time aging the outside or adding strips to mimic metal edging and pop rivets, but I can always set this aside to be "detailed" later :) It's missing some pearls and more rubies, but I'm sure I can pick some up at a garage sale for fairly cheap to give it more depth. It has a false bottom, so it looks fuller than it really is.

The barrel off to the left is one of the first props I've purchased from a fellow haunter instead of making it myself and I'm glad I did! The detail on the barrel is AMAZING! Painting alone must have been a pain in the *ss! The detail on the sea corpsed barrel is mind boggling! Check out Bobzilla's page here!

The barnacle sheet can be used to cut up and add details to objects and I'm really wishing I purchased some more at the moment! Bobzilla also has seaweed which is next on the buy list! I haven't stepped into the realm of molding yet and although I would like to be making these detail filler props myself I can't pass up helping a fellow haunter and the craftsmanship that went into making said props is fantastic.

Now I have a monumental task of finishing some tombstones for the graveyard AND hopefully starting on working on my CANNONS! I'm thinking of using my Grandpa's lathe to my advantage and making the cannon out of wood as well as the base. I want these babies to last almost as long as the real things! Still reading up on how to incorporate fog, lights, and sound, so until I'm comfortable with knowing how all of these work together this will be another project I probably only day dream about making!

Laureates Corner

I've decided I need to get into gear and make some tombstones for my Halloween display, but I don't want the same pun tombstones everyone else has, so I'm going to try something possibly a little different and use some people that were a hell of a lot more imaginative, creative and possibly crazier than I for inspiration. I was staring at my Edgar Allan Poe collection I bought at Barnes and Nobles (Yes it looks cool on my shelf with its golden pages and fancy shmancy possibly f aux leather binding, but it does come in useful other than looking awesome on my halloween bookshelf, )  and I started to remember all the cool slightly off kilter, dark and morbid stories I had fond memories of as a child when I use to read anything I could get my hands on, and I started to brainstorms of all the cool ideas I could come up for tombstones.

I started scouring my shelf for literary geniuses and I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to mimic Dave Lowe's zombie a month, but instead make a tombstone a month based off a poem, story, novel, or fairy tale.
With names like Poe, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Coleridge, Lovecraft, and Shakespeare, I'm definitely not short on said inspiration!

I'm not sure how I'm going to arrange this if I'll make a main head stone for each author and a couple smaller stones to represent literary works, or if I can just go full tilt on a large stone for each author focusing on one of their more popular pieces.. who knows!

I've been toying around this idea for awhile, but I haven't gotten a lot of shop time lately, and hopefully this gives me a kick in the arse to start getting busy on making anything!! I have three 4x8x2 sheets of pink foam sitting in the shed right now just waiting to be carved up! :)

I'm going to start my Laureates Corner off with Edgar Allan Poe, partly because I had this stone 85.97% completed for the longest time and it JUST happens to fit into the theme I have in mind :)  Here it is finally FINISHED!

I definitely want to elaborate on some more Poe stones.. Maybe a tell tale heart stone that has a prop beating heart, or mimicking a heart using a red bulb that beats in sync with music.. I also have a bunch of Poe's stories narrated by the one and only Vincent Price, so that may be cool to work in somehow too! 

I have a lot of ideas brewing in my head which doesn't happen too much, so I'm excited about seeing what I can come up with :) I think next I may try and do something Pirate related with Samuel Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a basis :) I've already said too much! ARRRR! 

I was hoping to find a cool date in Poe's life to correlate with his tombstone being made for the month of July, but alas I haven't had any luck, so I may not even go in  the correct order of months :) It would be kind of neat to list a couple of interesting facts about the authors and why I chose them, so hopefully the reasons get deeper than oh I've been wanting to finish that stone for months! :) 

Be that word our sign of parting!