Sorry, no haunted house this year...

On Alyssa's birthday last year, my wife and I found out that we were going to have another baby (Bonner - born 6/22/08). I knew going in to this year that we would have our hands full so I decided to focus on fewer projects. If that wasn't enough, we also decided to buy a house in August. All of that combined meant that a large Halloween party was out of the question.

We do plan on a big party next year and I'm already itching to begin work on some new props.

I was able to build one large prop - the witch and cauldron:

Daytime

Nighttime

Additional pictures can be found here.

Here is a low quality mp3 of the cauldron / witch sounds that I use. If you are interested in a high quality version, contact me.

I found a cool looking skull book at Grimvisions and thought that my witch could use one. So instead of buying his(?), I decided to make my own.

For my first attempt, I decided to make the book out of cardboard and paper mache. It worked ok and looks good, but I think in the future I will use a real book so that I won't have the aggravation of paper mache.

The skull is just a foam skull (no jaw) that I bought at Wal-Mart. The candle is a real candle.

To tie it all together, I took some black, "blue stoneware", and white acrylic paint and colored everything to match.

The one part that I haven't done (but will), is add spider webs to give it an "untouched" look.

For our daughter's 6^th birthday, my wife came up with the idea to have a cake that looks like a pumpkin patch. Here's a picture of the end result.

I took longer to work on this than I had anticipated but she is finally complete! I also had time to build her a shelf to hold her potions, books, etc.