Carnevil Entrance

I wanted to make a bold statement this year with our party entrance.  I decided to make a big clown face to attach over the entrance gate.  This clown was inspired by a Funhouse build by Keith Corcoran.  Check him out on YouTube.  It was painted onto two large 4' x 8' pieces of foam board from Lowes.

Columns out of soda boxes

I drink a lot of soda and so I throw away a ton of soda boxes.  I was thinking that I should come up with some way to use them as a prop.  So one day I started playing with them and came up with an idea for entrance columns to our Haunted Hotel. 

Here is how I made them:

Making a Vampire Hunter Kit case

Here is my finished product, however, yours can be any design you like.

Materials:
* Hard suitcase
* paper towels (the expensive cloth-like ones work best)
* craft glue (Elmer's)
* thin  cardboard (I used the cardboard from a 12 pack of soda)
* A print out of your words
* a cup of tea
* 2 shades of paint

Reaper

Learn how I made this in just a few short minutes.

Moss Statue

Learn how I turned this                                                    



















 into this

Building a lake

We decided it would be fun to add water to our haunted house.  There was already a plan to enter a cave so why not have to cross some dark water on a tiny bridge to get there.  The cave idea was created because half of our haunted house is under a metal car port and the other half is outside of it.  Since the car port has walls down part of the side you have to duck under the wall to exit.  This makes for a great cave entrance.

We started by finished the walls to the floor with plywood.  We rounded out the opening with the plywood and later covered the door with lots of Styrofoam to save the heads we are sure will make contact.  We outlined the water area with logs and wood we had on hand and screwed them together well.  There will be a lot of pressure on these from the water so they need to be well connected.  We built our bridge out of wood we had on hand.

Haunted House Day 3 - How its built

We are well past half way in building the walls for the first building of our haunted house.  I thought I would take  this opportunity to show how we are doing it.  We started by lining up the first row of pallets and screwing them to each other.  This gave us the basic building design.  Because the walls were all screwed together  they would T off of each other and this kept the walls upright.

Once we had the whole building set up the way we wanted it it was time to add the second row of pallets.  First we cut short pieces of wood and screwed those inside the existing pallets like this:

Carnevil banners

I have now moved on to painting my banners for the Carnevil.  My rocking Nanny has been very helpful by keeping me company while I paint.  These are very simple.  I cut up an old bed sheet for the banners.  I used my projector hooked to my computer to display the word on the wall.  Then it was just a matter of centering my banner on the wall with the words and tracing the letters.

Latest Creation

This is the first step in my new rocking nanny prop.  This beauty will be rocking a baby in the nursery in our haunted house.  I started with a basic wig head. You can see where I hollowed out the cheeks, eyes, and mouth and inserted the eyes.  The eyes are made from a ping pong ball cut in half.  The pupil was printed off of the Internet and glued in place. 

From there I built up her facial features with tin foil taped into place.  She was covered in paper mache fashion using paper towels to create the wrinkles.  The hair was weave hair purchased off of ebay.  I glued this in place using the same paper mache glue mixture.

Next I will build her body with pvc and a motor to make her rock.