Thread: Moscares 2011

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This is year three of my outside Halloween decorating. My set up is unique in the fact I have never had a trick or treater nor do I expect to. I live in the country and have no close neighbors with kids. However my road is pretty high traffic so I look at it as more like how most people do there Christmas displays. It only matters how it looks from the road. Which is nice in some ways but also means I don't get to do alot of cool things like some people do. Last year I went truly big for the first time with a occult themed main display.

(last years pics)
http://www.halloweenforum.com/member...bums-2010.html


This year the orginal plan was to convert the entire yard into a pumpkin patch complete with farm machinery and skeleton farmers. I got sidetracked and didn't locate the kind of stuff I wanted(early 1900s tractor/trailer/thresher) in time so I switched gears. I had the skeletons left from last year and due to a recent redo of the front of my house a bunch of plywood siding. This lead me to build some coffins since they would be free.

I'll be posting some pics here but my album will include alot more detailed pics along with captions that explain what the pic is and how i did what your seeing.

This years album

http://www.halloweenforum.com/member...ween-2011.html

I ended up building two full sized full depth coffins and one "groundbreaker" style with bits and peices of what i had left. The coffins themselves are exterior plywood and the trim is actually 1x2 that came off when I stripped the front of my house.






I wanted them to light from the inside in a sort of portal to hell way and I played with what lighting I had laying around. First I tried some string lights and then switched to a single flood bulb. Ended up having one laying with the flood bulb and one with a single 100watt red bulb and did the groundbreaker with a string of blacklights. I'm wasn't real happy with the ground breaker and the plywood into slats to let more light out. I also ended up painting the inside of the coffins white so they would reflect more light out.

(detail of inside with flood light)


(at night with red flood inside)


I knew that I wanted a full sized skeleton seated one of the coffins and wanted one standing.Once I got the coffins lit I noticed I didn't like the way they looked next to the rotted apperance of the skeletons. SO I had to distress them. I took a 4" grinder to the lid then poured on a couple dif colors of wood stain.

I love the imagary of a hanging victim and decided that right out front I would hang one of my skeletons from a tree. I had to put a 2x4 in the tree to get him out far enough from the tree to really see and some fishing line keep him from turning in the wind.



The other full sized coffin got its skeleton adn an Reaper in overwatch. Lit from the inside with an orange flood it catches your eye first as you drive by




Since my front yard is about as long as a football field I had to figure out where i wanted to start and end as well as how much of my stuff I wanted to use. Since last years was pretty dense I wanted to space things out a little more this year. About this time it was also decided that we should also use all the pumpkins we had sitting around and do at least part of the yard in the orginal idea of a pumpkin patch minus the machinery. I took the very front of the house where there is a hosta bed and converted it for use as a pumpkin patch.

We took the pumpkins we had grouped them and then used a witch standing on the porch as their guardian. We ended up with like 5 groups of lit pumpkins



these were pretty simple as the light is just bunched up minibulb strings with each group uisng a 100 light string between them.

the witch at first wasn't going to be seperately lit but in the dark she faded into the house and disappeared. The first use of various colored floodlights just didn't do what I wanted so I ended up settling on a single 100watt white light bulb hide at her feet.

(pic with flood light)


I finally got around to putting up my gravestones but since we haven't had any rain in about month the ground was as hard as a rock. SO I took a garden hose and let it run as I hammered in the stakes. Then I'd take the hose to the next spot and do it again. I ended up OK but I thought it looked empty so I took some more scrap and buildt a bunch of small white crosses which I filled in between the stones. I saw a news report on the drug wars in Mexico and they showed a graveyard full of wooden white crosses and to be honest it was creepy so I stole the idea. (detail photo of crosses in album)



Like I said my album has more pics including some detail shots and interior decorations. I'll be adding to it and this up until the 31st.

Like I said I'll be detailing out alot of this up til the 31st. A simple thing I did was to simply take a couple bags of topsoil and pour them in front of one of my grave stones. I heaped up the dirt to make the grave look fresh. It doesn't show up at night but during the day its very obvious. I did something similar to the groundbreaker coffin.



you can see in the background one of the groupings of jack o laterns. The one issue with using the string lights was how to cover the lights that run between the groups of pumpkins since i didn't want to string extention cords everywhere along with the lights. I ended up taking some more scrap lumber 2x6 and laying it at an angle over the lights, so they aren't visible from the road. you could also run the light strings through a length of PVC if you were worried about lights being visible from the back.

I mentioned adding the white crosses to fill in my graveyard. In the pics above of the hanging skeleton you can see the stones behind it and see how much "dead" space there is, then compare it to the pic that includes the crosses. I actaully went to the old local cemetary to try to get the most realistic spacing I could.

I love all of it... the coffins look fantastic with the distressing you did, and the lighting really makes all of it pop.
Love the idea of using string lights to light up a JoL group and using pvc to hide the lights in between...

Great job!

It looks great!!! I don't have any TOT's either but we have a HUGE party every year. I moved a lot of my stuff inside our shop this year because of weather, mostly wind. Do you have a party or anything or do you just have REALLY lucky neighbors that get to look at this every day?

Great pictures!!!!
Love the pumpkins!

Thanks for the kind words,

The string lighting in the pumpkins came about from last years design. I pretty much used up every outdoor extention cord I had and the little battery powered lights didn't have enough output when the pumpkins were anywhere near a spotlight. I had been reading on here about building a coal bed and using flicker lights under Great Stuff to acheive burning effect. I figured what the heck and strung a set of constant on orange lights with a set of alternating flashing orange lights and shoved them in a pumpkin. The constant on lights glowed nicely and the flashing ones added some movement. The lights are put in through a hole in the back which I made using a normal hole saw. The reason I use one string for 3 pumpkins is thats what I had last year and it worked so I stayed with it. The PVC idea was adapted from running electric lines in conduit

All of the lights work off a single timer and a single circuit so I don't have to even think about them once everything is set.

I don't have a party but my neighbors down the road do each year and somehow they always end up stopping their hayride to take pictures in my front yard. The wind hit me pretty hard last year and tore alot of my gravestones out and made me rethink how I do them. I ended up attatching plywood to the back with screws and glue adn then attatching my stakes to that. So far this year I've seen 30 mph winds and haven't had any issues.

I mentioned yesterday that I had changed the lighting on the witch that sits above her pumpkin patch. I had been using a flood light and just hadn't been happy with any of the colored bulbs I had used. I ended up setting up a single 100 watt household bulb on the ground about 4' in front of her. Its not a waterproof set up but its not staked down so I just have to pick it up and put it up on the porch if its going to rain. The effect was what I wanted. It didn't drown out the pumpkins and left them a nice orange color but lit her up where you could tell what she was.




Hopefully in the next few days I'll be at a point I can shoot the over all pictures so I can show you the complete set up and not just bits and peices.

I also went through this years album and captioned everything except some tombstone pics that I took when I went through the graveyard looking for tombstone ideas to mimic but am probably not going to have time to knock them out this year.