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.