New surroundings!

Sadly, there has been a horrible lack of updates and progress to anything remotely related to prop building or Halloween and that's because I've been in the middle of moving! Now that the monumental task of me hauling out all my belongings (borderline hoarder) I have a place of my own to call home. The misses even let me have my Jack Sparrow Helmsman be the focal point of our living room (whoo hoo!) :) The line was drawn at hanging my Ouija boards affixed to any wall, but they are still allowed to be displayed in the bedroom! Between moving and work, I haven't had time to work on a single project and I'm getting anxious. I'm still getting settled down into my new abode, but I am itching at working on stuff I had planned to already have finished.

Halloween this year won't be that grand, but I plan on sticking the Helmsman on the porch with a pirate flag and other assorted Pirate props and it will be a start :) Already been scoping out the neighborhood and it looks like there are plenty of kids out and about, so hopefully I will eventually become a staple on Halloween night. My room always has a Halloween feel to it, so it's won't be a huge deal not going absolutely crazy this year! Around November the Christmas decorations come out and my house becomes an homage to The Nightmare Before Christmas, so I still get to keep all my Halloween props out, but I just add a little of that Tim Burton Nightmare flare to it and it ties it all together!

I even have a small storage shed I am hoping to convert into a *SMALL* work shop. It should be awesome to finally be able to decorate an entire house instead of just my room! The living room is going to be devoted to all things Pirates and the Dining room is going to have an Alice in Wonderland vibe, so I have my work cut out for me!

Until the next update here are some pictures of my new place,

My Book/DVD/Pirate/Mansion shelf of wonders. Awesome

Haunted Mansion elevator painting done by a close friend of

mine!! 

The first Ouija board I made with directions from www.howtohauntyourhouse.com

Bed/Dresser/ Comfy red Chair and my Nightmare Storage Box!

Second Ouija board and my nightlight a Steampunk inspired lamp!

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!

The Nightmare Before Graduation!

Here is an awesome project I finished as a graduation present for someone who likes The Nightmare Before Christmas as much as me! :) This is for a friends daughter and it started out when my Girlfriend bought her a bunch of Nightmare Before Christmas bows for her hair. All the bows needed a container, so the wheels started turning and I decided to make a toe pincher coffin jewelery box and further elaborated on the Nightmare theme with a hand painted  box to hold everything in. The box turned out to be almost a small trunk, lol! Needless to say her eyes lit up when I carried the box into the house and it was awesome seeing her reaction, and I know this will be a cherished gift that can't be purchased anywhere! :)

The size and cost of the jewlery box wasn't that much, so I'm thinking about making several more of them and seeing if I can sell them to my girfriend's friends who also have insane hair bow collections, although some of them may need full size coffins for all their bows, but I can do that too :)

The box and coffin were both made out of plywood and painted with acrylic craft paint. I used a paint marker to draw the swirls and it's a ton easier than trying to use a paint brush to draw the lines in my opinion! :) The skulls were also cut out of plywood. I made a Nightmare box likes this for my girlfriend last year for Christmas, and I am really digging them as a storage box. I think I'm going to make a set using different "wrapping paper" designs. Who says function can't look good :)