Halloween Decorating Has Begun

I can officially say that I started our Halloween decorating today! I started pulling out all of my paper mache pumpkins, my paper mache mummy, my paper mache witch head that I am still working on, and the paper mache fireplace. I have had a few people ask to see the finished fireplace, so I made sure I got it in the photo!

I still have a lot more pumpkins to unpack for our inside Halloween decorations, and I always bring out our lighted Halloween Willow Trees too to give the living room a nice eerie glow. Everything in the photo above, is made in paper mache!

I have also been working on a paper mache torso and I hope to get him finished before Halloween!  In case you are wondering how I created this torso, here’s how I started off:

I wrapped my own body with clear packing tape from my waist to my neck. When you do this, the first layer of packing tape must be sticky side out so it does not stick to your clothing. Once you get the first layer of packing tape around your entire torso, you then keep wrapping with the sticky side towards you. What you are doing here, is making a nice form for a torso. Once you get enough packing tape around you, the next step is to get the form off of you. Either have someone cut the form off of you, or you can do it yourself, but be careful not to cut yourself!

Now you have a quick torso made! Just tape up the place where you cut yourself out from the form and you are now ready to paper mache your torso. I am sure that there are tons of other ways out there in the Halloween prop making world to thicken your torso other than paper maching it, but for now I am using the paper mache process. (just a reminder, my paper mache recipe is just water and flour made into a kinda pancake batter consistency)

The next step is to make some arms for your new torso. I just opened up the newspaper and took one sheet and rolled up some long strips, then rolled a few more sheets around that first one. Tape up the side so it does not unravel. Make two arms. Now you need to make the hands – just ball up some newspaper for the palm and tape it, then roll up some shorter strips of newspaper for the fingers. Tape the fingers to the palm. Don’t try to be too exact in the length of the fingers, because you are making a scary Halloween prop, ya know! The weirder the better, if you ask me. Now that your fingers are attached to the palm, attach them to the arm, and you are now ready to attach the arms to your torso.

I know that some of this sounds a bit too much, but it goes really quickly. Nothing has to be perfect at all because you don’t want a perfectly formed Halloween prop. Once the arms are attached to the torso, you can bend or crease the newspaper arms to whatever shape you want. Do you want your prop reaching out for you, or do you want it to be reaching up in the air, the choice is yours so make it any way you wish.

Here is what the torso looks like now, just a few more layers of paper mache to go. HINT: For anyone attempting to make anything in paper mache, make sure you have lots (and I mean lots & lots) of layers of paper mache around your prop, otherwise can cave in. The arms on this torso prop are hard as a rock right now because it has many layers on it.

I will be adding a head to him this weekend so it will make him pretty close to completion. I am still tossing around the idea of putting him out in the yard, but I will need to seal all the paper mache really good so the weather does not ruin him. Flex Seal is what I would use on this guy if he heads outdoors.

It feels pretty good to look around our living room and see all of the paper mache items that I have made over the years. They were all easy to make, but they just take a lot of time to complete. Have you started on any new paper mache Halloween items this year?

 

Paper Mache Pumpkin No. 5

I can’t help myself.  These pumpkins are addicting to make.  I am on Pumpkin No. 5 right now, and have No. 6 in the works.  Pumpkin No. 6 will be a much smaller pumpkin that I am going to pose in the hand on Skully in the front yard as he is holding up my handmade pallet coffin.

Pumpkin No. 5 is by far my thickest pumpkin ever!  I used my Evolv Jigsaw and a drill to carve out the face.  You start with the drill to make an entry point for the saw blade, then slow the speed down on your jigsaw a bit and carefully follow the face drawn on the pumpkin.  

I drew a few mouths and eyes by hand on the pumpkin before I found one that I liked.  I know, they all could have been ok, but since I am perfecting my pumpkins as I work with the paper mache, I am going for perfection.  After I got the face that I wanted, it was time to get to work and cutout the face.

I cut one of my pumpkins with an Xacto Knife, but that took me close to an hour to cutout the face, so I changed to the Evolv Jigsaw to make this part of the process much quicker.  You have to be extremely careful when using any saw, but you work slowly and keep all of your fingers out of the way of the blade, and you will be ok.

I have learned a lot from making all of these paper mache pumpkins, and one thing that I have learned is that you MUST stuff the plastic bag really full of crumpled newspaper so that the pumpkin holds its shape.  This photo shows how much “stuffing” came out of this pumpkin.  When you remove the stuffing (aka, crumpled newspaper) from the pumpkin, you keep it for your next pumpkin.  Why reinvent the wheel and crumple more paper, when you already have a bag full of stuffing!

Since these pumpkins are not sealed for outside weather conditions, we are currently only placing them in our front windows at night so everyone can see them.  If we left them outside, they probably would be damaged due to water or the dew that sets in overnight.  I might try some of that Flex Seal product on one pumpkin before I paint it, to see if that product will work with sealing the paper mache and holding its shape.  Anyhow, with the amount of pumpkins I have now, I wanted to place them in the windows, but had no table to place them on.  Had to fix this problem…

With all of my craft projects, I use what we have around the house.  I save a lot of odd things, just in case I need them, one being the nice hard cardboard kitty food boxes.  These came in handy for making a table.  I just took three empty kitty food boxes and two old UPS shipping boxes and taped them together.  Then I mixed up a batch of paper mache (flour & water) and went to work!  The UPS boxes made the perfect top & bottom to my little table, as the kitty food boxes made the perfect column.

So, what do you think of Pumpkin No. 5?  It still needs to be painted, but it looks great in the front window, even unfinished.  I also used one of our LED camping lights inside this pumpkin instead of the orange Halloween lights which makes it glow differently than the others.  Variety is the spice of life!

Paper Mache Mummy

Geez, I could not resist!  After publishing my last post, and a few people commented on the cute mummy at the garden center, I just had to see if I could create one!  You know me and challenges…. I took it head on and got to work right after hitting “publish”.

It came together quite easily and he now stands 18″ in height and is 14″ in width.  I just basically balled up some newspaper for the body, and did the same for a head, then masking taped them together.  Next I rolled up some newspaper for the legs, arms, and fingers.  I took two small pieces of paper and balled them up for the feet and did the same for the palm of the hands. Then I had a brilliant idea to use my hot glue gun to attach the fingers to the palm instead of masking tape, and I did the same for the arms when I attached them to the body.  (NOTE:  Look at the first mummy on the left…. as you can see, his fingers are bent, so I will still need to do this on mine!  I have to make it look similar, right?)

I am going to start on the first layer of paper mache in a few minutes and once dried, I will place many more multiple layers as I have done in all of my paper mache work.  Then, to finish off the mummy, I will take some strips of newspaper, roll them up, then flatten them, and dip them in the paper mache mixture, and these will be used for the look-alike strips of white cloth that wraps all around the mummy.

So, what do you think?  He came together so fast and will be a quick and easy paper mache project!  He will be a perfect addition to the top of my paper mache fireplace with all the pumpkins!  Stay tuned to see how he turns out!

Paper Mache Halloween Projects

I know what you’re thinking, what are you doing talking about Halloween in July, right? Well, we LOVE Halloween and it takes time for us to prepare anything new for our Home Haunt, so we have to start early.

Paper Mache projects take a lot of time, with all the layers you need to attach, and with each layer, you need to do a lot of waiting to make sure each layer dries thoroughly before the next one is placed.

To start making a paper mache pumpkin, you can use whatever form you want, but I start usually with a large bag and fill it up with balled up newspaper or any other filling you can find.  Then, once the form is made, I take string and pull it up along the sides to make those nice indents along the sides of the pumpkin.  Next, you need to decide on how you are going to create the stem.  Sometimes, I just tie up the top of the bag for the stem and paper mache over it, other times, I take some newspaper and wrap it around a piece of wire so I can bend the stem in a funky shape.

I am currently working on a Haunted Fireplace for us to use either in the house as a decoration, or we can use it outside on Halloween night for another prop.  I am planning on setting some of my paper mache pumpkins on top of the mantel of the fireplace when I am done for a nice effect.

The one thing that I will need to work on and figure out how to do this, is to create a fake fire for the fireplace.  I have seen some neat effects of people using an old wire garbage can, a small fan, some red & orange lights, and some pieces of material.  The concept of this is to place the fan in the bottom of the garbage can so it blows upward and “moves” the pieces of material cut into flame shapes while the red and orange lights create the color of fire.  We’ll see if I can get this to work, when I get to that point or step in my process, but it surely will be interesting if I can pull this off.

If anyone would love to do some paper mache pumpkins for Halloween and need some help getting started, let me know and I will be more than happy to assist you.  I am far from being an expert on this, but with the more items that I make, I am learning some neat tricks along the way.

When Nine Inches Is Too Much

February just started, but the dreariness of winter has taken over.  The case of stir craziness of being cooped up in the house has already happened.  Being able to head outside without being all bundled up from head to toe seems like a dream right now – – oh, I miss those flip flop days.  And I found out over the weekend that nine inches is too much.  Too much snow, that is.

It was beautiful to watch it snow the entire day on Saturday, as it covered basically everything with that light airy fluffy snow, but within an hour or so, three or more inches fell, and it kept falling the entire day to approximately nine inches in our area.  We are thankful that it was not a heavy snow because keeping up with clearing the driveway was a chore already.  I did though, by accident, find out that I could use our leaf blower to blow some of the snow off the driveway since it was fluffy, so that helped a lot with the snow removal, but I could not use it on the entire drive as I ran out of extension cord.  Rats.

So, what do you do when you are stuck in the house watching it snow?  You play with the dogs!  They enjoyed all the new fallen snow as they ran like Tasmanian Devils through the snow piles and came back in the house with their fur all matted and wet. Pure joy is what it was to them, but nap time quickly followed but not before Nikita beat up a butter tub really good.

While the dogs napped, I took it upon myself to tackle yet another paper mache pumpkin.  This time, I am attempting to make an enormous one that hopefully we will be able to use as a prop for Halloween.  I took a large clear garbage bag and crumpled lots and lots of newspaper and filled up the bag.

Once I had what I thought was enough newspaper in the bag, I closed up the bag with some air still in the bag to help keep the pumpkin form.  After tying the top off on the bag, the next step to making a pumpkin is to pull a string around the form to make “indents” just like a regular pumpkin has.  Once you have enough indents, just tie off the string and you’re ready to start the paper mache process!

Just mix up some flour and water to make a pancake batter consistency and dip your newspaper strips into the batter.  Run your fingers over each piece of newspaper to remove excess batter and place on your form.  Starting at the top of your form, place strip after strip in different directions on the form until you get a layer across the top of your form, then work down the sides.  You will need to let the top half dry first before finishing the bottom half.

Once you get one layer done on your pumpkin, you will need to go over it again with a few more layers, drying each layer in between, until your pumpkin is nice and hard.  Just waiting for pumpkin to dry.  Making paper mache pumpkins takes quite some time from start to finish, and that is the reason I am making these this early in the year so I can have them ready for Halloween.  By the time the witching hour arrives, I should have quite a stock pile of them ready!

We had a nice weekend even dealing with all the snow we got, had lots of fun with the dogs, and even got some crafts done.  But, we have the best dogs in the world that bring us so much joy and happiness, even watching them play with a butter tub makes you chuckle.  Silly dogs.