Next Week on Iron Halloween Chopped!

As part of our June Halloween Club meeting this year a handful of us rose to a challenge that should sound familiar to anyone else who's ever camped out in front of the Food Network and wondered where their brain stem went.

Each team was given a bag (basket) full of unknown materials and given 90 minutes to create a Halloween prop. There was a community table of stuff; mostly tools, paint and some building materials.

Every team could bring two props from home. We chose a skull and were originally going to bring a rotating motor but replaced that at the last moment with a hot wire, which I never used. Score!

We had to use three of the six objects hidden inside the bag:

• Clear tubing
• Toothpicks
• Cotton balls
• Plastic Golf balls
• Rope
• Foam (a haunter's staple)

We all set about scurrying with our ideas, throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck, then trying to unstick it to glue it to our undead wasp mummy prop. I was in the middle of painting when the twist came, there must always be a twist or else something something.

On top of the three out of six (or 7 of 9 if you brought a Borg to help), we also had to incorporate a set of plastic curlers and an adorable fabric flower with a big smiley face.

I was too busy in the midst of creating to take lots of pictures so everything is "after."

Oddly, there was very little drama™. No one chopped a finger off, no one got into a major fight over the hot glue gun, no one accidentally reanimated a corpse and had it ransack the studio audience (the only watchable episode of Cupcake Wars.) We all laughed, glued, painted, sawed, and sliced through while encouraging everyone and finished before time was called.

But the props.

I may as well begin with our own. I decided to spray paint the skull a red and go full on demon:

For the golf balls, my husband cut them in half (because I'd have sliced my hand right off) and I painted them red, white and black and turned them into some serious skull bug eyes. The toothpicks were wrapped in duct tape, then stuck inside a cotton ball jammed in the rest of the golf balls and all that coated in duct tape.

This created the hands and duct tape newspaper gave the arms.

The horns were shaped from the foam.

The flower I spray painted a dead black and even gave it a joker frowney blood red face (which you can't see because I'm smart like that), we also cut off the end to reinforce the neck so no floppy headed baby demon.

As for the curlers, well I snapped them in half and boom instant demon eyelashes. Maybe she's spawned with it, maybe it's Maybelline.

A few of our other fellow haunters went in different directions entirely:

Spider and eyeball soup.

 Stabbed skull brain dessert.

 A little subdued Dia de los muertos:

 I, uh, still have no idea. Maybe it's upside down.

But this last one, I took one look at and went op that wins. No amount of skill can top light up eyes, sound effects or motions. It's Challenge rules 101.

Of course you don't get much cooler than that without bringing in something that shoots fire (note, next year bring someone that shoots fire), so we lost to the Bride of Funkenstein.

But much fun was had by all and I suspect we can use our little baby female demon somewhere in our home haunt (in the back somewhere), which is all we were hoping for.