My wife insists that this is the last year for me to do Halloween decorations. I can understand where she is coming from – she had a friend who lost her husband because he fell off a ladder. Because this is likely my last year, I went big – I combined two different house decors: my standard set, and my covid decor – which is essentially a big house jack-o-lantern face. Here is the result.
It’s interesting because many of the decorations were made 10, 15, even 20 years ago – so half of my effort is deploying them, and half of my effort is repairing them so that they’re usable.
These are two other figures that I designed for my metal figurine collection. (The first one was here.) I had intended to print them out, glue them to flat metal, and cut the metal – to end up with a physical ‘metal sculpture’ collection.
I found these guys under my workbench — literally.
It seems I created digital drawings, printed them, glued them to a piece of sheet metal, and was in the process of cutting them out to create standing metal figures. The concept was — they would be fully cut out (including the green base) with the bottoms of their feet still connected to the base, but bent — so the base would be flat on a table, and the figures would be vertical.
Not sure why I didn’t finish — maybe it was too difficult to cut the metal.
Here is my house decorated for Halloween. Almost all of the decorations are hand made by me, and so are arguably ‘art’. (The kids made the sign post, and some small items are store bought.) In recent years, the big spider has been hanging out in the front lawn — but I forgot how good it looks on the roof…
If I can find the photos/videos, I’ll also add my dinosaur costume and even my haunted (garage) house (which I haven’t set up in years).
[2021 Note] I set all this up this year — mostly because a family moved in next door with young kids, and it seemed the right thing to do. We even had trick-or-treaters. Some notes:
Ladder – My ladder broke when I was getting decorations down from the rafters in the garage. I got banged/scraped up pretty good on my left side (ribs, arm, leg) and the lack of ladder slowed me down on some of the details / finishing touches.
Spider – I put the spider on the roof, but was having challenges getting both eyes lit (I run a wire up to the roof and use lawn lighting, which is a big task). My wife suggested that I use battery lighting in the future — a great idea (and safer).
Rain – We had record rain, and the decorations got quite wet. I’ll have to judge next year how damaged they are.
