Sunday, October 28, 2012

Circle of Glowing Green Ghosts!

It has been a very crazy and busy past several weeks! I have so much to share with you too!

One of the first coolest things I wanted to post about is the circle of ghosts. I have had this set of white sheets for a long time, many years actually. I first made this with the typical 5 flat sheets and folded them over to a triangle and then tied the two opposite ends together as if the ghosts are holding hands. Originally, I had placed these over styrofoam balls mounted on a tall wooden stake. This was a quick fail as the styrofoam wouldn't stay on the wooden stakes and kept falling off and my poor ghosts kept losing their heads! I had tried to create this when I lived in Las Vegas and was very disappointed that it did not work. I tried many different things but couldn't get anything to work so I gave up on the idea temporarily until I could learn how to build it better. So I just packed the white sheets away into a Halloween box and I left the 'hands' tied together.

So now that I got older and wiser...I learned what might work better!

Some of the problems with the wooden stakes were that they were too thick and your ground needs to be very soft and not have any rocks. Yea....good luck with that!
The other problem of course is using styrofoam balls on wood. I've since learned how to connect these two things but....I think this is an even better idea!

Here in Texas, where I live, I get a lot of strong gusty winds and I battle as it is to try to make sure my tombstones do not get blown away. But each year as I unpack my Halloween boxes, I come across these set of sheets. This year, now that I know how it is here and I've learned some from the past, I thought about how to go about putting them up so they would stay and not lose their heads.

I decided to use shepherd hooks! Those with the points on the top and my kids' dad suggested instead of the stryofoam balls, to use pumpkins. I thought hey, why not use the white craft pumpkins for the heads and then I thought to add a green flood light in the center.

This really came out great and really kinda creepy to me! The shepherd hooks work really well and can withstand some pretty good wind if you get them into the ground good and deep. I draped the cloth right on over the tips and then cut a small hole in the bottom of the white craft pumpkins that I got on sale from Michael's Craft store. I then pushed the pumpkins over the top and because of how the shepherd hook tops are, the pumpkins don't even move!



I got the shepherd hooks from Home Depot, but they ran out of the ones I wanted so I had to improvise with a tiki torch pole and then added the 'arms' with curved brackets and zip-tied them onto the poles.



The green flood light is the best as you can see here in this pic! It really gives it a great eerie look! I did not paint nor carve faces out of the pumpkins either because I thought it really made it more spooky to not do so.



This has to be one of my favorite newest props that we put together and I was so happy to finally be able to use my ghosts!

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