An Unorthodox Halloween – Page 41

The Pumpkin Search continues, and other news.

Kyle’s mask is coming along. Got most of it sewn up and cut to fit. Just a few more modifications and some touchup painting left to do.

From 2010 Buildup

Talia has taken a disliking to the thing.

Debating whether to have him wear an “invisible” mask underneath or just rely on facepaint. I’m liking it, but thinking I could do a second much better. Might modify my methods and make a mask for me instead of the appliances I was planning on. I get claustrophobic in masks…badly. We’ll see…

The Pumpkin search made several strides today.

Our current price listing is as follows:

Day Farms: $.16/lb (best price on med-large sizes)
Maceys: $.19/lb
Home Depot: $4 ea
Walmart: *Varies by store. Seen them priced both by lb and by each. Averaging around $2.50 for a ‘normal’ size pumpkin
__________________________________________________

Farm in Harrisville: $.50 1-5lb, $1 5-10lb, $2 10-15lb, $3 15-20lb, etc *will not discount for my purposes as he serves a couple schools and wont have enough.
Country Gardens Nursery: $.20/lb *Likes The Harvest idea, will discount to $.12/lb for my bulk order
Welch’s Produce, Nursery, and Handmade Gifts: $.20/lb *offered 25% discount ($.15/lb) for bulk order, but willing to haggle on that.

—I need to check with Day Farms about a bulk purchase.

But, the question now is, since I’m already doing a bulk purchase at a discount…any of you locally want to jump in on it? What’s a couple more pumpkins when I’m already ordering a ton? (possibly literally)

Reaping.

One of the highlights of my little trip was yet another of the ‘go all out for Halloween’ folks calling my whole idea of the Harvest ‘boring’.

Yes. Boring.

I get that quite a bit, actually. “What’s your theme?” Go on to describe that I want things well lit with torches and no strobes or any lighting effects. “Why” is the best I can hope for. “Boring” is more typical.

You don’t go around calling yourself unorthodox without getting a lot of ‘why’ and ‘boring’, I’ve decided.

Anyhow, some history on the ‘boring’ idea. Some time back I got a complaint that my work desktop was ‘depressing’. At the time it was a pile of skulls, so I set out to find a less depressing, yet halloweenish desktop. Since it was awful hard to find anything of mine minus skulls, I found this.

From An UnOrthOdOx Halloween

The longer it sat staring at me at work, and the more setbacks I had in the whole Spider Woman plan, the more it began to call to me. Thus, after one last setback, The Harvest was born.

Returning home, I deemed the pile of corn at my disposal insufficient to the task at hand, and with most sources either being too expensive (not free), or already tapped, it was time to strike out to plan B in earnest.

Mom’s big book of botanical omniscience declares this to be reed grass. I just call it great. Pulling up along side the road in the middle of nowhere, and start reaping the stuff from the ditch.

From 2010 Buildup

About 1 and 1/3 of a truckload later…I swiftly ran out of my intended storage, keeping this all off the grass till final week of October. (1/3 truckload because an airplane crashed into me. But that’s a long story in and of itself. Let me just say to whomever makes emergency kits, red soap to wash wounds makes it awful difficult to tell what’s blood and what’s soap…) So, there’s been some spillage into the yard.

From 2010 Buildup

So, the cat’s out of the bag where we are going here. These sheaves will be spread out much more, stacked everywhere. Probably less grass/corn per sheave, and spread out to appear as big.

From 2010 Buildup

Home

It’s good to be home…

Nice to see so many of the neighbors have already started putting out their items. Especially after being in a town that I could have brought home the entire town’s decor home with me in my car… Little pumpkins, spider webs, inflated hearses, skeletons, and ghosts greeted me as I drove around to see who was in the spirit. And I know there are a few who have yet to begin.

The wind while I was away seems to have battered my own stash of corn hanging about the fringes of the yard. Ah well, it hadn’t been put up proper yet anyway.

I hope to get some items of my own started this coming weekend as well. I also may begin with ‘plan B’ on the whole corn situation…. But, I need a trip to the hardware store first, and that must wait until tomorrow.

The mostly background work on the website here has seen me flit and flutter through 3 separate themes, and a host of custom coding and settings adjustment for the lot of it.

You’ll immediately notice the new rotating images atop there. I’ll be having some fun with that now that I FINALLY got it working properly. That’s been a source of my consternation for the last 2 nights.

There are a few things that still need some tidying up. I know the comment form isn’t the best match with the rest of the forum, some of the other pages are still in need of major update, and I need some icon work all around. If you find anything else broken, however, please comment on it and I’ll add it to my to-do list. However, I need to get to work on some ‘real’ items now, not just the virtual kind. We’ll look more into this after the big night.

Travelling to Exile.

A pictoral journey with me.

Ack, it’s ugly!!!

Yes.

Yes it is…

I’ve been seeking a new theme to spruce up the place for some time now, and with a week where I can’t work on anything “real” I figured it would be a good time to fix the old place up.

So, bear with me for a few while I find all the settings to get everything working. I’ll also be adding a few things to the projects and gallery pages. I’ve also been long negligent in fixing up my links that never made it from the OLD blog. Now that I have room for that without killing the main posts, I’ll get working on that as well.