Happy Halloween!

Halloween as usual at our house

These are ‘Day of the Dead’ carnival heads. Want to know how to make them? Find out here! Go ahead, do it. It’s not that hard. And it’s cheap too.

So, what do YOU do with an exercise ball?

Our next door neighbors took a one month vacation and they didn’t have time to cancel their morning paper. They told us to just recycle it for them. Our local paper is usually not worth the time to read so instead of throwing the crap into the recycle bin, why not make something out of it. Like maybe a giant head made out of Papier-mâché using an exercise ball as the form? As seen in the above picture we have some paper and a large ball. If you don’t know how to make Papier-mâché, just look it up on the internet someplace.

What to do with a giant paper ball?

1) The big ball can be manipulated in a number of ways and other paper parts can be added to make the desired head topography. 2) If you want to wear this thing on your head, you should use some kind of device to keep it firmly seated on your head so the headpiece does not flop around. I used a skateboard helmet I bought at the Habitat resale store for $2. A helmet with a hard plastic shell works best; that way you can bolt some heavy cardboard struts to it and attach the struts to the inside of the giant ball.  3) With the helmet in place, try the head on for size. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and poked a small hole where I thought might be the best height for an eye-hole. From there I made a sample mouth and tested to see if I could see where I was going via the mouth slit. 4) If the mouth slit works, then it’s time to paint the head. I had some left-over white interior house paint that worked quite well.

Giant Heads, Version 1.0 and maybe even version 1.1

At first we thought our costumed idea might be some kind of bi-polar Jack Skellington character but we didn’t have time to work out the rest of the outfit. While looking through our vast collection of stuff we found two bright yellow contamination jumpsuits that might work. At least if we couldn’t see the cars in the street due to our obstructed vision maybe the drivers of those cars would see us?

Beta testing and advertising

1) Going out into the real world could be scary. A week before Halloween the City of Fort Collins had something called a Zombie Fest so we thought it would be a good idea to try out the version 1.0 heads while walking though Old Town. The test basically was an obstacle course of streets, curbs, stores, zombies, bushes, etc. and we learned two things from the experience: First we were a BIG HIT with the zombies (I assume they though there would be GIANT BRAINS in those heads?) and second we needed to make the mouths at least three times larger so we could see where we were going! 2) With the new and improved version 2 head I made a quick visit to the spooky family event at Laughing Buck Farm to see if I could walk around small children and barn animals– Seemed to work well! 3) The front of the face of Version 2 where we turned version 1 into a Dia De Los Muertos carnival costume.  4) On the back, some reference to my ‘homies’ at the local hacker spaces: The FCCH that looks like the structural formula for Fluoroacetylene is for the Fort Collins Creator Hub and the LCS is for the Loveland Creator Space.