The old Olympus Stylus 820 was on it’s last legs so we replaced it today with a Panasonic DMC-ZS5 and I must say so far I’m SUPER impressed with the quality of the pictures taken in low light. I only played around with the presets and Starry Sky with the shutter set to 15secs got some amazing shots. Gonna have to dig in and start programming some custom ones because 15 seconds might be too long and I also want to play with aperture settings as well. I noticed that shots with a lot of red got overexposed with some parts showing white.  But then again the camera was around $250 so I think I’m getting a pretty good amount of bang for those bucks. Check out some of the shots of the current yard setup below.

The first two darker pics of Harry the Scarecrow were taken in Night Scenery mode, the rest in Starry Sky. Need to find a happy medium between the two.

Got the garage all set for corpse building. Going to be adding three rotting corpses on stakes, one hanging from the tree, a mid-autopsy corpse, and at least 2 ground breakers. Man I’m gonna be a corpse making madman – gonna try and rip all those out along with redoing my cauldron stirrer, not to mention getting one side of the garage itself converted into a lab and several other little things all before 1031.

For the mache corpses I plan to take a play from Stolloween’s book and multi-task between corpses while the others dry. I have a rack I built in the garage just for the purpose of drying these guys. And while those guys are drying I can build other stuff.

Too much to do, too little time indeed…

The countdown has started and only 30 short more days till Halloween. Per our annual tradition, Harry the Scarecrow went on display this afternoon. It was raining but tradition must go on. This is not his official position but alas this is where he’ll be most of October until the major stuff starts going out. Usually we try to put at least one thing out a day with more and more added the closer it gets. We might have to take it slow this year being a new house and the lawn care company has one more visit. I don’t want any of the extension cords or stones getting damaged.

Walls are JUST about done, just need to put the hooks in for the rear chains and drill screws for the cauldron lights.

The pipes and clamps are assembled and rusted up. They just need to be attached to the walls and it’s good to go. Think I’m gonna need to buy some screws for the clamps though, don’t think I have the right size on hand. Can’t wait to finish these panels up. They’ve been fun but I still have 100 million other things to get done.

Made a good big of progress on the wall panels which will serve as a facade in front of our garage. The large opening leads into an internal room in the garage. The other smaller opening is still in the deciding stages. Since the walls depict a sewer like setting, I’m considering making it a small alcove with a faux ladder leading down into darkness and perhaps something climbing out. If I do go that route it would just beg to have a bottomless pit add-on next year or so.

The material I bought last year for the surface of the walls sucks ass though. Took an entire gallon of paint to base coat 4 4×8 panels because it kept soaking up the paint. And doing a running wash was difficult at best because the watered down paint kept going in the pores and drifting to one side instead of downward. The rusted pipes on the other hand are coming out really well. I just need to paint the connectors and mount them to the walls.

Testing the new amber, red and blue lights in their expected positions. There’s gonna be another blue flood aimed at the tree from the right side. I’ll be doing more tests next week with more lights in place. I have to keep taking the wiring down because we still have a few more weeks of lawn care coming and I don’t want the machines chopping my cords up.

The witch jars are nearly done. I was able to grab some shots of several of the intermediate steps so you folks can see how it’s done.  Like I’ve stated before, I can’t take full credit for these as they were inspired by Pumpkinrot who’s the real mastermind behind them.

So lets start with what you’ll need:

Mason Jar, black and red acrylic paint, some twine, Elmers Glue, a couple brushes, some bendable hemp wire, a tea light, and optionally some dyed cheese cloth.

I started with an empty mason jar (Michaels has various sizes, however the larger of the two complete ones above is an empty pepper jar). I then took some red acrylic craft paint and loaded a small brush. First painted the bottom of the jar then with a loaded brush jiggled it around the inside (try to avoid touching the sides directly and go mostly for splash). I then used black paint for the inside of top where the lid would screw on.

When that was all done I coated the outside in elmers glue for a glaze effect (a decent glaze will work just as well).

I then took the dyed cheese cloth and glued it to jar.

Next I took a wire hemp and bent it for the handle. I partially looped each end and taped it to the jar with black electrical tape.

Then I just wrapped twine around the lip covering the hook until I was satisfied then brushed on a heavy coat of elmers glue so the rope would stay. After it dried I bent the loops the rest of the way up.

After everything dried I went back and touched up the hemp string by dry brushing with black paint using the smaller brush.

Pretty much it.

The lights are the little battery powered tea lights. I like the six piece sets that come from CVS as the plastic cover can be removed without having to cut it off.

Thanks again to Pumpkinrot for the wonderful inspiration.