A banshee, a scarecrow and a headless horseman...

Sounds like the beginning of a really bad joke, doesn't it?  :-)  Well, close.  Those are my Halloween decorations again this year.

And I do actually hope to have them done before Halloween this year.  Just to be different.


Last year things kinda...got away from me, and I ended up rushing to get everything up.  The horseman turned out a lot better than the first year I did him, but I required assistance in getting him in position and secured.  (Name withheld to protect the identity of my assistant.  Love ya!)

My first headless horseman - kinda dumpy, huh?

Last year's horseman - much more menacing!

As you can see, I improved on the horseman a lot.  First was new clothes - pants (Ladies size 18, actually), cowboy boots, vampire cape and a button-down shirt, all from Goodwill.  The ax was a cheap plastic toy I bought the year before @Wal-Mart; I sprayed the blade with hammered metal spray paint, and attached it to the handle of an old broom.  The sword, likewise, had its blade sprayed with the hammered metal spray paint.

The body is STUFFED with leaves - there are two branches in the legs to act as "bones," but he's standing upright mostly because of the amount of leaves I jammed down into the pants.  The torso has a "back" for support - one of those old Ab Roller exercise...devices.  (Those funky blue plastic things that came out in the '80s, supposedly to make it easier to do sit-ups.  Trust me - they don't work.  Unless you like rocking on your knuckles.)  The sleeves and bottom of the shirt are taped shut to keep the leaves in place. 

This year the plan is to use 3" diameter PVC pipes in the legs for stability, and to position one of the arms upraised to hold a skull.  That's the plan, anyway.  So far I managed to use my rotary tool to cut one of the lengths of PVC shorter, I have both pipes down into the boots, and the pants slipped on over the pipes.  Now I just have to make "hips" to keep the pipes the right length apart, stuff the legs, make "bones" for the arms out of smaller PVC, make a "hand" from thick wire so it'll hold the skull, and figure out how to make a motion-activated skull stay lit up.

Then there's the banshee.  The first year I made her head from papier mache, and would slip a glow-stick into a hole I cut in the back so she'd glow green.  I had a lot of people compliment me on my angel.

First banshee.  Pretty, isn't she?

Last year's w/a different head, but she's falling apart

The body is just a white skirt pinned to a white blouse.  The arms are white opera gloves with cardboard tubes and cheap toilet paper for padding.  The "shoulders" were actually my first attempt at making vambraces with thin cardboard and papier mache.  They were duct-taped to an empty microwave popcorn box that the neck was inserted into.  The face is a plastic mask sprayed with white primer - it had red lips, which showed through just slightly pink, and I left the green paper I used to make the head showing through the eye holes.  The shawl came from my Galadriel Entranced costume; I thought the tattered edges were a nice touch.

Last year I lucked into a Styrofoam wig head at Goodwill, which I painted a light grey.  I gave her pale green eyes, and painted them with glow-in-the-dark paint.  I glued a pair of cheap plastic (purple!) eyelashes on, glued the head to a block of foam, and slipped a LED strobe light into the neck.  I turned it on before I hung her, and it flickered day and night.

The original - looks like something out a Japanese horror movie!

Last year she looked more like a movie star.  Sigh

This year she has a new wig, and a new body; I have a duct-tape torso that I'm filling with plastic bags, and I used pool noodles (Those foam things for floating in pools) for the arms.  I also got a new blouse that has a frilly collar.

And that brings us to the scarecrow.  I love the movie Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci.  Last year I attempted to replicate the scarecrow from the movie; I had an old TV antenna tripod the previous owners had abandoned in the woods, which I thought would be perfect for the scarecrow - I could move him around the yard every couple of days, just like the one in the movie would suddenly show up somewhere else.

Well, in theory, it was a good idea.  In practice...

I had an old black dress from a Halloween costume someone gave me.  I slid that over the tripod, ran a couple sticks through the arms and lashed them to the top of the tripod, jammed a stick into the opening and stuck a foam jack-o-lantern on the stick.  I'd removed the lightbulb from the pumpkin and melted a hole in the base for the stick, then slipped a green glow-stick into the mouth.  I set him in the corner of the two fences, so the tripod legs were hidden by the rose bushes.  And everything was fine...until the first strong wind.  Needless to say, he lost his head.  A lot.  I finally ended up using tent stakes to secure him, so unfortunately he didn't get moved around the yard.

Ooh!  Scary!

Gotta love fog

This year I want to adjust the arms a bit so they're a bit more upraised and work on not having pointy shoulders.

Stay tuned!