5 ft posters

I love finding ways to make props out of free stuff.  This year my big problem with the carnival is filling up dead yard space.  So to fix that I went to my local furniture stores and asked for their boxes.  They were more than happy to let me have as much as I wanted.  These make great "canvases" for some large clown paintings.  Here is how I did it...

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.

Dollhouse Roof line

The haunted doll house is coming along slowly.  I have completed the siding on the first floor and part of the second floor.  I had to stop there to complete the roof line.  Here is a picture of the cardboard roof extensions.

Doll House Siding

I am finally finished with the paper mache and it is time to put siding on the house.  I took a ton of Card Stock paper and ran it through a paper shredder to make my siding.  It is actually a little smaller than I would prefer, but it is cheap and will still look really neat.

Building a Haunted Doll House

I was never that into doll houses when I was a kid, but after seeing some of the haunted doll houses people are doing I changed my mind.  I have seen many neat doll houses that were repainted and turned into haunted doll houses.  That is a quick way to go, however, if I really want to get into decorating this thing I need to get the right scale and do it correctly the first time.  I knew I wanted 1:12 scale.  This means one inch in doll land is equal to one foot in the real world.  This is the scale most collectable doll furniture will be in.  Once I started looking for that scale of doll house I realized they were really big bucks.  No problem, I will just make my own.

This is the journey of building my dream haunted doll house:

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