DIY Fake Blood - Tablecloth Decoration

I'm helping a few friends decorate for a Halloween party and I couldn't wait to share the results of this project!! Let's call it a "sneak preview" because we have plenty of other great things we made I will blog about shortly. I've personally never tried to make fake blood and wasn't sure how this would turn out. I will happily admit it worked better than expected (with a little trial and error) and that I had SO much fun unleashing my inner Dexter! ( lol )

Now I will admit that there are plenty of "fake blood recipes" out there if you just Google them, but I decided to wing it with what I already had in the house. If you are a by the book type of person you might want to do a little research to see what recipe works best for you.

I started off with 2 cups of water and added some corn starch for thickening. My lesson here is that it didn't really do much. (So honestly you can probably skip the corn starch.) Also, when I put about 40 drops of red food coloring it only really turned the water a dark pinkish color. I didn't want to use up all my food coloring so I started adding chocolate syrup and cocoa powder until I got the color I wanted. It wasn't really that much, maybe 2 tablespoons of each.

My BIG TIP here from trial and error is to start off with less water! That way you don't have to mix in as much of the other ingredients. I will say that having 2 cups was helpful to me though since i decided to decorate the tablecloth with my hand. More on that below...

I considered using gloves and realized it wouldn't get me the desired effect I wanted. I just had to see what my hand print was going to look like because I was dying of curiosity. I also knew that it would reveal to me if the mixture i created was dark enough in color to truly show on the material. As you can see above it worked out well. (Note: I call this a tablecloth because that is what I'm using it for to decorate. It is actually a long white window sheer curtain.)

Now my next technique idea was discovered because of the fact that when i pulled my hand off the material my finger tips dripped the excess onto the tablecloth. I immediately thought, wow that looks like pretty authentic blood spatter, and no that doesn't make me crazy it just proves I've watched every episode of Dexter (some twice)!

So then I decided to take a page right out of the Dexter book and flick my fingertips outward. (If you haven't seen the show, he often recreates the blood spatter of crime scenes by throwing fake blood to see the velocity and trajectory.) The result was really awesome and seriously fun! See for yourself below...

A few other things I decided to do was write "help me" and take my hand and drag it across the material to make a smeared pattern. I let it dry for 15 minutes and then threw it in the dryer for another 15 minutes. The material seems to be holding the color. I do wonder though if it wouldn't just wash right out if I sent it through on a soak cycle. However, I advise that whatever you decided to decorate with fake blood that it not be something important in case the staining is permanent.

Halloween Card & Treat Bags

Crafty Kid and I made two different Halloween projects a few weekends ago. The first was a card. 

We took a blank white card and stamped it with some dancing skeletons. The bottom of one stamp had a spider and the top of one had a cat, so we inked only that part to get the desired look. Then we took scrapbooking paper and cut out parts so you could see the stamps poking out. After we glued down the paper we placed the spooky stamp on top. (See below)

The second craft was making treat bags. You can pick up plain bags at any local craft store and there are many great ways to decorate them. Below are just a few examples of what we did.

The bag above we decided to make the skeletons "dance" up steps.

This second bag we put a ghost on one side and a cat stamp on the other.

To get the desired look we put black ink on a Q-tip and smeared it around.

You can start off with light strokes and press harder to make it darker.

The third bag we used the Spooky stamp.

We cut out a border with the scrapbook paper and glued it on.

Below are the finished products.

As you can see, it only takes a few crafting tools to make lots of different designs.

If you try this project at home let us know how it turns out!

Halloween and Fall Decor: Philadelphia and South Jersey

I went home to visit my family in Philadelphia and South Jersey this past week. I couldn't help but be impressed by all of the decorating that happens for the Halloween and Fall season. I don't tend to see as many people decorating their homes in West Virginia, which is a bummer. I took a bunch of pictures to share all the cool stuff I saw and hopefully it will give you some ideas for your own home decor. 

The pics below are from storefronts in Haddonfield, NJ. Also, my friend happened to have a very accurate fake skull for schooling purposes and I found it very festive!

It's a jolly holiday with Mary...

So we've already talked about my love of Halloween, so it should be no surprise that I go all out with my costumes!

So who I am being this year is someone I've loved since I was a kid... Mary Poppins! Now anyone who knows me well knows I'm a BIG Disney fan. And Mary Poppins, my friends, was the start of my Disney experience.

It was the first Disney music I was exposed to as my Mom used to play the record for me when I was a toddler. She said I'd dance around to it for hours, so it's no wonder that this story has stuck with me all these years. I even took my family to see the traveling Broadway production of it in Philadelphia a few years ago and cried like a baby at the end! (Mostly cause she flies away with her umbrella! So cool to see live... a real flying Mary Poppins! Ahhh, I'll never grow up.)

Now I've been other Disney characters in previous years, including Snow White and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan. Mary, however, has been on mind for a long time and I just couldn't wrap my head around how to pull her costume off. That was until my friends and I did a clothing swap this Spring and I found the perfect Mary skirt! It was off to the races at that point as I knew the rest would be easy to put together if I set my mind to it.


So here in this post I'm going to show you how I made my Mary Poppins hat....

Luckily for me I already had a black bowler hat from a previous costume when I was a clown. The first step was to get rid of the rainbow strip on the original hat and replace it with a black strip of ribbon. Two reasons using the black ribbon works out really well for me:

1) The black ribbon covered the glue that was left behind from the original strip of ribbon.

2) I glued all the remaining pieces needed for the hat onto the ribbon. If I ever want to use

this hat again for something else it will be easy to take off and start again.

 

 

Below you will see the fake flowers and berries I picked up at my local Michaels. (Lucky for me Christmas stuff is out already so I didn't have any issues finding the berries. On the flip side, they didn't have any daisy flowers so I had to create my own.) 

 

I carefully removed the flowers from their stems and used scissors to cut the berries off. Notice I left the stems of the berries long so that I would have an easier time arranging them before gluing them on.

 



 

 

I chose to stack the petals to give the flower more depth. I learned from the first flower I did that the best way to achieve the look I was going for was to hot glue the center of the first petal to the ribbon. I then hot glued the center of a second petal on top of the first petal.

Now I could position the berry where I wanted it and hot glue it, making sure to press down on the petals and seal the berry stem between the ribbon and the petal. Once it dried I put a third white petal hot glued in the center to cover up the hot glue marks on the petals below.

Final touch was to the small yellow center flowers. Again, I stacked two yellow flowers to give it more depth.

 

 

 

Now the clown hat had come with a flower sticking out of the side. This was amusing to me as you might have already noticed from the picture I posted above of Julie Andrews, that Mary Poppins also had a flower coming off the one side of her hat. I didn't think the original flower worked so I altered it to make it a white flower with a yellow center.

 

 

 

So that is how I turned my cheap clown costume hat into a pretty decent replica of Mary Poppins hat. I can't wait to share the final look of my costume! Only 3 weeks until Halloween.... stay tuned for pictures :)