We plan the Halloween issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine months in advance, and I am always searching for ideas and inspirations to help make the current year’s decorations different and more intriguing than those in past issues. This year’s planning was no different.
While in California earlier this year, I visited a wonderful antiques store, Blackman Cruz Workshop, in Los Angeles. There I saw incense burners made of bronze in the shape of bats. I also saw a lone claw foot from an old bathtub that was being used as a paperweight. When I saw these items, my mind started to work.
The magazine’s decorating director, Kevin Sharkey, who was traveling with me, loved the idea of a fancy, glittery, eerie, somewhat macabre holiday decorating scheme for my house in Bedford, N.Y. We put our heads together and came up with several creative ways to infuse a home with some very scary stuff.
A giant glass cheese dome, something I have had in my kitchen for many years, formed the perfect display case for green-glittered plastic skulls and bones when set atop a very large cake stand. A silver-glittered hand became a bony place-card holder, and its ideal resting spot was on a silver lusterware plate.
On that same trip, I visited an excellent nursery, the California Cactus Center, where I found an old lady cactus (Mammillaria hahniana) — an especially long-haired cultivar. Six of them proved to be perfect as a mysterious and smoky filler for a cauldron centerpiece made from those clunky bathtub claws and ball feet, the pots shrouded by dried Spanish moss. The bat-shaped incense burners became vessels for dry ice and smoldered in a doorway.
Relying on methods used for centuries to decorate hats and bonnets for every season, I fashioned leaves from green silk taffeta and paired them with silver-painted pumpkins on my hallway table. They are really very easy to construct and especially effective. Antique glass jars can be used to display old-fashioned candy, including gum balls and hard-candy sticks. A further surprise: glittered orange insects climbing on the pumpkins.
Craft stores and catalogs are filled this time of year with myriad items that can help set an eerie tone. Using items from your cupboards and closets, and a bit of imagination, you can devise many things that will create a ghoulish scene for curious trick-or-treaters and holiday party guests.
How-tos
Glittered skeletal parts
Remove springs and screws from plastic skeletal parts. If the pieces require assembly, secure with a glue gun. (Don’t serve food from tableware used to display glittered bones).
1. Cover work surface with newspaper. Using a craft brush, apply tacky glue to half of a skull or bone.
2. Hold object over a large, shallow bowl filled with ultrafine opaque glitter. Spoon glitter over glued surface, making certain the glitter falls into all crevices and sockets. Place on a tray. Repeat. Let dry for at least 1 hour.
3. Tap or brush off any excess glitter. Repeat gluing and glittering on uncoated surface of each piece, touching up as necessary.
Shimmering pumpkins
For the pumpkins:
1. In a well-ventilated area, coat pumpkins with silver floral spray. Apply as few or as many coats of spray as you like. Let dry.
2. With a craft brush, paint stems with green acrylic paint. Let dry.
3. Brush plastic toy insects with tacky glue and coat with orange ultra-fine opaque glitter. Let dry.
4. Attach bugs to pumpkins using a hot-glue gun or poster tack.
For the leaves:
1. From a 1/2-yard piece of green silk taffeta, cut out three 6-inch squares, three 7-inch squares and three 10-inch squares.
2. Fold one large taffeta square in half. Lay the large leaf template (available at www.marthastewart.com/pumpkinleaf) along the fold. Pin to fabric, and cut out. Repeat with remaining squares, using smaller templates for smaller squares.
3. Snip cloth-covered floral wire into 45 9-inch pieces, and separate into nine sets of five wires. Wrap a set with floral tape, beginning 3 inches from the top of bundle if you’re making a small leaf, 4 inches for a medium leaf, or 5 1/2 inches for a large leaf. Tear tape. Splay the five wires at top to create “veins.”
4. Apply glue to one side of splayed wires, and press against leaf. Let dry. (If wires extend over leaf edge, trim after glue has dried).
5. Shape leaf with your fingers. Repeat.
For the tendrils:
1. Brush an 18-inch length of floral wire with tacky glue; sprinkle with chartreuse glitter. Let dry. Create as many as you like.
2. Coil wire around a pencil, leaving about 4 inches of wire straight at one end.
3. Using floral tape, wrap “tendrils” onto leaf stems. You can create a vine by joining the stems with floral tape, or simply arrange the leaves beneath the bases of the pumpkins.
4. Affix crystals to leaves with tacky glue.
Questions should be addressed to Ask Martha, care of Letters Department, Martha Stewart Living, 11 W. 42nd St., New York, NY 10036. E-mail to mslletters@marthastewart.com.
&Copy; 2007 Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.
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