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I covered the door to the bedroom with a fitted queen size sheet. This isn't actually black,
but a deep navy blue. To the right, is a closet (with the light on inside.) The apartment complex would of put a rented
washer/dryer unit in there. But I can't afford it, so I converted the space into a mini workshop. (Yeah, it's small. You'll
see.) To the left, is a utility closet, where the A/C & water heater are installed. Both closets have a louvered bi-fold
steel door.
The fitted sheet, although it's oversized, was fitted around the bedroom door. Miniature bungee
cordspicked up the slack in the extra fabric. After the sheet is attatched, you can still adjust the sheet, pulling out the
wrinkles and smoothing the fabric. But if it doesn't work out, I may yet decide to cover the door with black plastic, using
thumbtacks, (with flat heads,) along the edge of the door.
The hooks were simply places on the flange of the hinge itself. The flange, being the flat
plate part of the hinge that is actually screwed to the edge of the door. In this case, I used a total of three mini-bungees
to take up the slack.
In the utility closet, I set up a strobe. The light shines out the louvers of the door and
illuminates the door to the bedroom and the floor directly in front of it. This area is a small square of walls with doors.
Utility closet, the bedroom and the mini workshop. I plan to hang black plastic over the "hallway" and enclose this area,
leaving a slit in the plastic to get to the bedroom and the bathroom beyond it.
In the Mini Workshop, I mounted another strobe. I went through a period of trial and error,
in positioning this strobe. I wanted the light to shine through the louvers of the door as much as possible. The trick here
is to set it about a foot back, inside the closet, and at the same height as the top of the door itself. Both strobes are
flashing at noticably different rates. When the black plastic encloses the area here, it'll darken the hallway even further.
So all you'll see is the strobe effect, without the strobes getting washed out by the rest of the atmosphere of the apartment.
Here's the rest of the Mini-workshop. When I lived with my parents, Dad had a nice garage
and a lot of tools and workbenches for a wood shop. I'm so used to the 2-car garage. Being reduced to a small 3x3 closet,
hurts. Believe me when I say, I envy those who have a large work area. This closet is barely large enough to entomb a mummy.
In the first image, @ the top of the page, you may have noticed a ceramic skull. This was
velcrowed into place, atop a wroaught iron table lamp. The bulb was replaced by a nightlight. Not just any nightlight...
but one of those color changing nightlights. It used to have an acrylic light diffuser, It was solid, and had air bubbles
in it.
I wanted the LED workings more than the acrylic bit, so I snapped off the diffuser, and ended
up with the exposed color changing LED. I screwed in a socket adapter that changes a socket, into an outlet, plugged in the
nightlight, and placed the skull on top. Now, the light inside the skull changes through the colors of the rainbow.
Behind the lamp is a four foot, 2 bulb blacklight. This shines mostly into the livingroom.
There are two other fixtures like this one in the apartment, so there's no lack of UV in this house.
At the other end of the bar, is a floating firey cauldron. One of those fake-flame jobs. This
one I picked up a few years ago. Wal-Mart, I think. It's always been indoors and has never been disappointing. I suspended
it with fishingline. There were three holes along the rim of the cauldron. The holes were for three chains to hang the cauldron.
But the chains are long gone these days, but I managed to hang it from the holes.
First, I propped up the cauldron at a height I wanted it to hang at, using a coffee can and
a dictionary. By threading the fishing line through the holes and into the swagged fixture, (wroaught iron, like the
table lamp,) weaving the fishing line between the two. I created a suspension of six fishing lines to suspend the cauldron.
Since I tied the ends together, creating a loop of fishing line, and did NOT tie the line to either the lamp fixture
OR the cauldron, the fishing line can move. This helps as the cauldron had to be adjusted to be level to work properly.
With a darker background, you can see the fishing line zig-zag back and forth, between the
cauldron and the lamp fixture. I used another socket to outlet adapter INSIDE the lamp's socket and plugged in the cauldron's
transformer into that. I also wrapped the excess wire around the transformer, so to hide the extra wire.
Behind the front door, I hung another double bulb four foot blacklight. I found that it was
a lot easier to hang a shoplight virtically, with a bit of swag chain and a swag hook, screwed into the wall, instead of the
ceiling. This also made it easier to position the lamp fixture near an outled, yet it's still pretty close to the ceiling.
Having the fixture this way, will help illuminate the costumes people are going to wear. Whatever they may be.
Last Christmas, I went to a Dollar General store, and they had a six ornament set that changes
color. (Color changing LEDs inside.) I bought two sets. One for (UGH!) Christmas, and the other one to gut, tear apart and
use the LEDs somewhere else. I also had five foam pumpkins. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that the LEDs would
look "oh so cool" inside the pumpkins. So the rig got installed on the pot shelf above the kitchen cabinets.
I also picked up a few chasing light sets at a Spirit store that materializes around my area
every fall. These are what is known as "Rice Bulbs". These put out a good bit of light, considering their size. Since the
effects can be changed, (chasing, flashing, flickering, slow dimming chase and such like that,) I doubled up on the strings
and placed them in front of the pumpkins.
I then used clear cellophane tape to keep the bulbs/sockets out of the way of the cabinet
doors. One bulb has already given it's life force for the party. It was crushed, unceremoniously.
The plan for the cabinets here is to use black plastic sheeting to "giftwrap" each door, so
they'll all be black. I plan to do a lot of "giftwrapping" with black plastic. as the whole apartment is an ugly beige. That's
fine for the rest of the year, but not Halloween.
Almost everything is operated by remote control. Being a double amputee, it's really tough
for me to run all over the apartment, plugging everything in. This is a two-remote control unit. It has two sets of remotely
controlled relays. One remote controls the LEDs, (pumpkins & stuff,) while the other controls a few other things, like
the blacklights and the floating cauldron.
This particular unit was picked up at Target Superstore last Christmas. It was about $25 to
$30. But I use it constantly, and it STILL has the original battery that it came with.
In this little corner, I have my spacy stuff. Three Lava Lamps and a satellite lamp of my
own creation. The red Lava Lamp is resting upon one of those lightning disks. So this looks spacey, and it has a rapidly changing
effect, which counterbalances the slow Lava Lamp action.
The red Lava Lamp also has a slender glass envelope with what looks like a bubble lamp inside.
This is usually seen on a smaller scale for a set of Christmas lights. But in THIS lamp, the tube looks a lot larger, and
it's really a cool effect. There is also glitter INSIDE the bubble lamp. So, you have three effects going on... The Lava Lamp,
the bubbles of the bubble light and the addition of the glitter.
This is all placed upon a circular mirror, which not only doubles up the lighting & effects,
but causes the reflection to be upside-down. Eh, not really "Holloween-ish", but just something weird.
Yes... One of the Lava Lamps has already been knocked over while it was in it's liquid state.
Totally mixed up the yellow wax & the clear blue liquid. So, it turned to this lime green goo inside. I almost lapsed
into a coma. Usually, this would ruin a Lava Lamp for a long period of time. But I just left it running overnight. It's was
almost as good as new the next morning. Other lamps I own, don't seem to recover as quickly.
So if this had ever happens to you... Don't unplug it. Let it run for as long as the Lava remains
moving. Sometimes the Lava will drop to the bottom and just lie there. Turn off the lamp, let it cool for 24 hours, then run
it again. Eventually, the wax will return to a single blob, and it'll be fine.
Another tip. Place Lava Lamps on lower surfaces. A countertop or bar seems to be the
highest elevation that a Lava Lamp will operate, before overheating... (settling into a single mass at the bottom of the globe.)
Short end tables, desks and short bookcases are great. But make sure that the heat from the
lamp is able to escape the vacinity of the lamp, or it'll overheat and the wax settles to the bottom of the globe.
Keep them back from any action. Tipping over a Lava Lamp is damaging, but it takes a long
time for the lamp to recover.
The spacy stuff just wasn't doing it for me. The lamps get pretty hot to keep the wax molten.
Having three of them in one area just heated up the house like you wouldn't believe. So out it goes. It just wasn't the halloween
enough.
In it's place, went the cauldron and an illuninated & animated cat. The cauldron fell
from the hanging position under the swagged lamp at the end of the bar. But, as you can see... it STILL WORKS!
You can notice the two positions that the cat moved to in these two images. The head &
paw move from side to side, while the tail moves up & down.
In the corner, just to the left of the desk, where I'm sitting right now,) is one of
two old busted up white bookcase. The bookcases were found in the refuse room of the condeminiums where I lived in Illinois.
They were free. But the years have taken their toll. Now their nearly as good as dumpster fodder. So, when my next door neighbor
wanted to put a fogger skull in the party. Richard is another big haunter who has haunted a house for halloween for the last
10 years or so. I had to figure out where he could put it, and how to construct it.
The fogger is pretty deep. He want's to put a hood over it, and put a dummy body below. I
figured that if there was a board, mounted to the top shelf, (circled in the image above,) that the fogger could sit on that
shelf extention, pointed to the center of the room. The hood could have a large hole in the back, (I actually have a hood
WITH a hole in the back.) And the dummy body could hang from the shelf, from underneath. So expect an update on that.
Check for the latest update concerning the skullhead fogger.
Also, I have another little store bought prop. It's based on the flying crank ghost. It consists
of a black plastic tube, a whispy fabric ghost that has it's head and hands, suspended on black cords. It's activated by light.
The plastic tube has UV LEDs in it, so those illuminate and cause the ghost figure to illuminate with a blueish UV glow. The
hands and head drop & rise while a disembodied series of groans are emitted. This little prop is going to be put in the
blacked out/strobe hallway.
Imagine walking into the darkened hallway, with strobing strips of light bolting back and
forth and a ghost prop comes alive graning in a weird glowing blue/purple. The door itself is going to have an animatronic
door knocker. Buggest problem? I can't run any screws into the luan door. (I'm in a rental,) so I have to figure out another
way to stick it on the door. How these two sensor activated props are going to behave in a strobing environment, has
yet to be seen. But I believe I'm going to figure out how to block the strobes with a sort of "shade" around the sensor openings.
A lot of black plastic is going to be put up, and I have one of those huge inflatable spiders.
We plan to put it out in the back yard, hunched over a victum. (I'm wanting to get some bagged webbing and wrap the victum
prop in webbing. The spider is a giant thing. I believe it's an 8' x 10' spider, with a blower motor that keeps it inflated.
It also has five candelabra bulbs inside. It came with clear/white bulbs. But I swapped out those for red. So this will be
another update to look forward to.
Food:
Well, I'm stuck. I want to have some normal food items, so the guests will be comfortable.
But I also want to go with the halloween type foods too. Like a brain gelitan mold of a brain, or some other totally gross
but completely edible. My guests are expected, (and already know,) that they are to bring their own drinks. I'm on SSI, so
I can't really afford to provide drinks as well as food. So I'm kind of toren between something like a six foot submarine
sandwitch or grinder, and the totally gross stuff for a halloween party.
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Please be sure to visit "How to Halloween" A new up and coming site on building your own Halloween decorations for next to
nil!
The Halloween-L is a great website & forum. You should go there NOW! Ok, after you view my website. But right after that,
go there! (If you know what's "Boo" for you!)
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