Haney Days: Halloween "Pin"spiration 2011 (Part 1)

Recently I found a website called Pinterest which has become my go-to place for ideas, inspiration and procrastination. The site has two key purposes - the first is as a place to collect and organize ideas from around the internet. Using a 'Pin it' tool bar gadget you can put pretty much anything with a picture onto your own group of pin boards and follow up on later. The second purpose is sharing ideas. All of the pin boards are open to anyone on the site so you can search for ideas that others have collected. I discovered the site at the end of the summer, just in time to start thinking about Halloween decorations.

As you probably know, Wayne and I do a pretty elaborate outdoor display for Halloween, but we don't do much at all inside. Inspired by some of the DIY ideas I found on Pinterest, I put together a few decorations for inside (some of which ended up outside....). All these ideas share the same criteria: dirt cheap (or using stuff I already have), able to finish in one or two sittings and super easy. Usually 'super easy' translates into ideas that are designed to be rustic or distressed. I'm going to try to link to the inspiration picture and my version for each of the things I did.

Creepy Plate Display: I've always loved the look of scientific pen and ink drawings and patent drawings so this really caught my eye. The directions for the DIY said to use Modge Podge glue to affix paper cut outs onto dollar store plates. Sounds easy, but this particular project was much more difficult to pull off than any of the others I did (other than the one I didn't finish ;) ).

Inspiration:

Source: bhg.com via Lori on Pinterest

Lori Version: I spent a lot of time searching for images for the plates and came up with some fun just with a google image search of key words...but not all of them were resizable and some were just a little too creepy. I didn't want to spend a fortune so I limited myself to four items for the display: Esher's Bats-Angels print, Phrenology Map of the Brain, Rapunzel Witch climbing up the tower, Poe's Raven.

From Drop Box

I thought selecting the prints would be the hard part, because the next part was just gluing, right? Riigghht. First problem is that my dollar store plate are off white, so rather than cutting out large shapes I had to cut really close to the design itself in order to minimize the difference between the white paper and the plate. I decided at this point to do a crackle finish after gluing to try further mask the difference. More on this in a second. The next problem that I had was that my ink jet print outs bled when I put the modge podge on. Apparently, this happens if you don't use a laser printer. Luckily, the ink bled either blue or green (no idea why the difference in color) and it kind of looked like I purposefully colorized the prints. After the glue dried I put on a crackle medium that I had on hand from Halloween projects gone by..and darn it all if it didn't work...not only did it not crackle much, but it actually didn't stick to to the plates and started peeling. Of course, as is the nature of crackle finishes, you don't know what you get till you put the paint coat on that makes the cracks visible. I was pretty devastated when the grey paint smudged and speared- mostly because I'd already rationalized all the other things that had gone wrong and had hit crafting rock bottom. Both kids tried to cheer me up saying how much they liked it, but I decided I just needed to put them away for a while. When it was finally time to put them up I actually found that I liked them, "warts and all" and now I find that I will be sad to take them down now that the season is over. I might find a permanent home for the Rapunzel Witch, because she makes me smile.

Monster Silhouettes Pictures: I'd made some silhouettes of the pets earlier in the summer and found they were easier than I expected, so when I saw pins of silhouettes of a witch and Frankenstein I knew that I could do that. I also knew that I had some old frames from Walmart and black stock paper, so this was a great project for that awkward hour before the kids get home when I always feel antsy. The inspiration was from a Better Home's and Garden template that I couldn't get to print out, so instead I searched for clip art on Microsoft that showed a good profile and went with that. At first I framed the with a white background for a traditional look, but one day when I was in Micheals I noticed this beautiful fall scrapbook paper on sale and decided to give it a try for background...and I'll tell you a secret...I actually like mine BETTER than the inspiration.

Inspiration:

Lori's Version: