[SaltwaterServr]

Wind destroyed some stuff this morning. Dread Pirate Roberts (our nickname for him) lost his chest and shoulder, had one arm snap off, and the other arm twisted 90 degrees. It must've been nasty because that arm was PVC glued into the fitting. Ended up using screws to hold him together. The white sheet guy was broken too. Put him back together as best I could.

I was hot gluing the eyes into DPR and the White Sheet Guy as the first ToT's came up the sidewalk. Ain't no minute like the last minute!

Only had about 120 trick or treaters, but the kids that stopped and stared made it so worthwhile for me and the wife. Perhaps one or two of them will remember this night for years to come long after the cavities have been filled and they're "too cool to dress up". We got a lot of requests from parents to let their kiddos pose in front of Starbucks or next to the Creep. Only had two start to cry but they were both about 4 years old.

I got to meet a few more neighbors too. One retired gentleman took photos in the day as I was setting up around 4:30 and then came back this evening to get the full effect.

My wife said to me at one point, "you know we're on about 50 Facebook pages right now." That made me smile. It's all about making memories for the little ones.

I told most everyone to make sure to come back next year, it'll be really interesting. After it was all said and done, the wife and I about to go to sleep, and we started working on ideas for next year. She says, "what about a dragon?"

Hmmmm. A dragon...Medieval theme...Yeah. That dog will hunt.

My first year haunt video. Sorry for the shakiness, and you can't really see the spider's butt although you can see him a bit better in the Giant Spider PVC Legs tutorial thread.

 

[SaltwaterServr]

I forgot the wife took some photos this afternoon as I was still setting up! One of the worms isn't in place, he actually didn't have teeth yet, and the ToT didn't have his bucket.

 

[Paxley]

Hi SaltwaterServr

GREAT setup ! Really, Really like the big old spider.

The TOT's will be telling all their buddies at school Monday: how scary Halloween was this year
. . . and the older ones will be talking about all your cool props

I would say you're officially "hooked" now.

If " Medievil " means to you: a cross between Excalibur and Lord of Rings,
then you and I may be swapping some ideas the coming months.

Again, super nice job !

Paxley

 

[SaltwaterServr]

Hi SaltwaterServr

GREAT setup ! Really, Really like the big old spider.

The TOT's will be telling all their buddies at school Monday: how scary Halloween was this year
. . . and the older ones will be talking about all your cool props

I would say you're officially "hooked" now.

If " Medievil " means to you: a cross between Excalibur and Lord of Rings,
then you and I may be swapping some ideas the coming months.

Again, super nice job !

Paxley

Thank ya!

Oh yeah, Excalibur meets LOTR and the Hobbit. Gotta have me some dragons.

What I've got in my head so far:

Ice Dragon on my sideyard that shoots snow out of his mouth with fog too. Froggy's has a second-tier snow machine that's not too pricey.

I'll take the spider from this year and make him into a cavalry steed with a skeleton riding him to attack the dragon. I'll put a few more skeletons over there with bow/arrows, sword/shield, halberd, etc attacking the dragon too. I want to take what would've been my 12' tall scarecrow and either make him a giant on a leash held by a pair of skeletons attacking the dragon or him partnered with the dragon attacking the skeletons. It's going to be very tight fit on that side. Especially since our FIOS cable and gas lines run through there, no staking down.

Second, across the driveway, I want to do a wizard with a smoking cauldron. I also want to add spinning rings around his cauldron like these: (skip to 5:00)

What's funny about you mentioning Excalibur is that inside those spinning rings, inside the smoking cauldron, I want an arm with a sword to raise up. The problem though is the depth of the cauldron has to be significantly deeper than a rope-handled cauldron to hide a decent size sword/arm. My back up idea is just to have a skeleton climbing out of the cauldron with other skeletons posed across the driveway to go fight the dragon.

I'm wanting to do a bottomless well, just to have something for the kiddos to look at that they can interact with. The twist on that is I'm thinking my neighbor two houses down could do one too, and we have our mirrors inside at a angle so it looks like our tunnels connect. A simple speaker microphone connection between our houses would let one ToT talk to the other like it was a real tunnel. Nothing medieval about that, just an idea in my head.

I want to do a little horde of small spiders, something like 12" balloon bodies and then do multiple hanging spider victims.

Other than that, I'm at a loss. Only 363 more days too!

 

[matrixmom]

I love the sign about burying the bodies rates. So funny. Everything looked great.

 

[JCO]

Love the spider. What did you do to texture it like that?

 

[SaltwaterServr]

Love the spider. What did you do to texture it like that?

For the body I used normal Great Stuff a single blob at a time. Not the Big Gaps Great Stuff, just the regular. As the can ran out, I sprayed it across the body to get the lower nodules and bumps.

For the legs I had to squirt it into my hand and then put it on after a second or two.

EDIT: DON'T shoot it into your hand directly. Use disposable gloves!

Then I corpsed it using Stilt Beast's heat gun and plastic sheeting method. You can see what it looks like under the paint here:

You lose a lot of the tiny bumps and knob-like nodules by putting plastic over it. The plastic does give you some benefits though. First, you can shoot paint on it a lot faster since there's much less surface area. Secondly, the Great Stuff will break off the legs if you accidentally hit it. The plastic in this case keeps it in place since it is essentially shrink wrapped. A tertiary benefit I got was that since the legs were fluorescent green, it was going to take significant amounts of paint to cover that. In this case, as single coat hid the green.

 

[slash]

great haunt I really like the huge spider and his victim.