Danse Macabre

When not getting a book out for the world to read (I just passed the deca-sale mark. Free penny candy for all!) for the past few months I've been hard at work in the ol' deck/concrete patio workshop making a little bit of autumn magic.

The Halloween club my husband and I are members of has decided to partner up with a local charity that helps kids get into college to throw a Halloween Ball. What this means for the scalding months of Summer is that each week we trounce off to the meeting headquarters (which are sadly not in the middle of a misty graveyard but a sweltering garage) and get to work on the decorations.

The theme is Living Graveyard - which the kids helped pick. This means tombstones, gobs and gobs of tombstones.

We've got a system down pretty good. My husband cuts and carves the store, I add the epitath and paint the sucker.

This is our first stone, a fairly simple carve job and one hell of a lot of pain in the butt small lettering.

Next up, I wanted to go different more realistic and marble like. So a cross with a latin inscription.

I actually put a lot of gold paint in this one, that then got covered over with the white because I'm always creating oodles of paint layers until I'm happy.

The third is something out of Egypt or more accurately the British museum.

 My husband was hoping for a pristine obelisk but as he started hacking away these horrible gashes showed up so it got aged a lot.

I was a bit tired of being on the painting sideline so I grabbed a mostly prepared stone and added my own embellishments.

This is also when we start getting into the super nerdy stones. Having run out of traditional IE boring ideas we've started to fall back on insanely inside jokes. In this case, a Templar tombstone. He wasn't so good at avoiding that rage demon.

Any fans of Doctor Who? You might be able to guess what episode this is in reference to.

Again, my husband did all the carving to make the angel. He positively obsessed over her face and hands, leaving small styrofoam shrapnel in his wake.

And the last so far completed stone returns to the world of Dragon Age, in this case the second story with a family stone:

I actually carved the little crest you see up top and it was positively maddening. I'll never be able to drink tea on the ceiling again.

It's late July, only 100 or so days til Halloween. We're 6 tombstones down, there are about 30 more to go and we still have to make a cave and a gravedigger for our scene.


Come October I'm going to be nothing more than a large blubbering ball of foam, hot glue and gray paint rocking back and forth in the corner. Which really isn't that different from any other year come to think of it.