Tis The Season For Repairs

Spending the week repairing some props that have been damaged over the years....tonight's agenda is fixing the legs on three spiders.

Eight Legged Cake

"Excuse me waiter, there's a spider in my cake."

My son's 12th birthday cake from 2007, found this photo while browsing some old files.

Made me smile.

How Cool Is This?

Last week my oldest son surprised me with a gift he made in his 9^th grade welding class. Created from 24 hard cut masonry nails this iron spider has to be one of the coolest gifts that I have ever received.

Thanks Carter….now you need to teach me to weld.

The Wheels On The Bus

Sorry, I can't help it.

Here's another prop and presented as an animated GIF.

Hay, It's A Spider!

We came across this amusing creation while traveling on old US 131 between Reed City and Big Rapids, Michigan.

Halloween is coming!

Three Spiders

Completed three new papier mache spiders for the 2008 display. Need to do some modifications of the paint such as toning down the white drybrush and adding red to the eyes.

The spiders were created with plastic grocery bags, water bottles, wire, newspaper, cardboard and broom bristles.

September WIP (Works In Progress)

I swear I’ve been in a crap ass mood the last couple of days thanks to the weather which has been mostly cold and wet. I’ve had a couple days where I didn’t even look at my props let alone think about working on them…but I have managed to get about eight pieces ready for paint and about six more close to being done.

Tree Faces. These are designed to be attached to a couple of very large trees in our front yard, a spooky greeting for our TOT’s. The challenge will be to paint them so they match the colors of the bark on the real trees…I think they will look pretty cool when done.
Working on three large Cyclops skulls…this is an exercise in weirdness as I’m not sure where they will finally end up...a fun process regardless of how they turn out.
Some ancient skulls I finished a couple of weeks ago. I wanted something that would look like they just came out of an archeological dig…an Indiana Jones prop. They feature a very interesting texture that was the result of coating the prop with a flour and water mixture then blasting with a heat gun until the paste bubbled and cracked…should look nice when painted.
Finally one of three large spider props complete with eight eyeballs and some bristly hair made from strands of an old broom. My stuff in the works…lot’s more to come in the following weeks. Here’s hoping the weather and my mood improve!

Spiders In The Works

Here is my inspiration for some large papier mache spiders.

A small plastic spider toy I have had for many, many years:


And here is a a partially completed papier mache version:


These spiders were designed for a papier mache class I was going to teach, but due to multiple problems with their creation I nixed the class because I felt it would be more frustrating than fun. The spider technique I’m using is still a good solid approach, it just would not work in a classroom setting.

Very quickly here are the steps. First a small plastic grocery bag was filled with crumpled newspaper until it was the desired size for the spider’s abdomen. In this case the circumference of the abdomen was 23 inches.

A full sheet of newspaper was wrapped around the plastic bag and wrapped further with masking tape. The paper and tape helped create a nice round circular shape.



A piece of heavy duty utility wire was wrapped around the paper abdomen form, a loop was formed in the wire to accommodate hanging the prop for display and for the building process.

(Note that in the photo I’ve already attached the legs, but this step should be done after the plastic bag has been stuffed with newspaper, I’m making this up as I go along so I’ve made a few mistakes.)



Next the top half of a plastic water bottle (.5L) was hot glued to the abdomen. The bottle was filled with crumpled newspaper for strength.




Additional newspaper was taped to the water bottle to “bulk up” and create the head form.



Next, long sections of 16 gauge utility wire were passed through holes created in the newspaper/waterbottle using a large awl.

The wire will form the skeleton for the spider’s legs.




The legs were wrapped in newspaper and masking tape to give them shape. Some plastic strips cut from recycled milk jugs were hot glued onto the body and legs for support. Finally the entire body was covered with strip mache.




The last step featured here was the addition of papier mache clay giving the top of the abdomen some design/texture, more clay on the head and the addition of some eyes and hair (broom bristles)




Just realized the photos don’t show the eyes, no biggie because I didn’t really like the eyes anyway, they were too small.

Here’s the eyes:



The next steps:

Fix the legs, they are still weak and very rough looking. May add some hair bristles to the legs as well.

Fix the eyes, the spider pictured above used garbanzo beans (cue laughs now) but they really need to be bigger and smoother.

Add some detailing to the bottom of the abdomen and head. Also further define the fangs which were simply created by attaching corrugated cardboard cut-outs and defining with clay.

There was quite a bit with this project that didn’t go well, but I think the spiders have potential to be pretty cool.

It’s been a couple days since I have last worked on them so I think I can approach them with a fresh outlook and some fresh ideas.

Stay tuned.