Oelke Halloween - 1995
With 1995 being the first year that we decorated our house big time, it
started off modest but ended up making a big splash in the neighborhood
because of the large web in our front yard. Unfortunately we don't
have any pictures that we can find right now to scan in for 1995.
Please see our 1996 and 1997 pages for lots of good stuff.
Spider Construction
The spider on our roof was our big creation. He was created by using
large plastic trash bags and stuffed with crumpled newspaper. The
body was one large bag filled quite full and then tied off. The head
was another bag, but not filled nearly as much. Sue cut white plastic
circles for eyes and we used lots of little loops of duct tape to fasten
them to the head.
The legs were made by taking a bag that was laying flat like a rectangle,
and splitting it half lengthwise. The open ends of these two pieces
where then overlapped by a couple of inches, stapled and taped with black
duct tape. This left a long narrow piece of plastic, with the
2 ends sealed from the bag end. We then folded together the open
edge and used a stapler to seal it shut. With about 8 foot long legs,
8 legs, and a staple every inch or so we went through a lot of staples.
We waited to stuff the legs until there was only about
a foot or so left open, then filled the leg with crumpled newspaper
and finally stapled the last little bit shut.
Anchoring the Spider
Now that we had this spider, we had to come up with a way to secure him
on our house roof, and hold his legs, body, and head together. Since
the front of our roof has a small peak jutting out over our porch, we figured
that this would be a good resting spot, with the legs dangling down just
above the front walk. To hold him in place we figured that a 50lb
bag of sand draped over the peak would serve as a good anchor. To
hold it all together - duct tape! Which we were happy at Walmart
in black. Unfortunately, the month of October had some wind, and this blew
stuff around. The body was much bigger than the bag of sand, so it
blew a little from side to side which would weaken the tape holding it
down, and then the legs would shuffle around as well further weakening
any tape job. So, every night and sometimes morning Dan had to get
up on the roof and re-arrange the legs and re-tape.
This constant movement of the plastic garbage bags meant that sometimes
a corner of a shingle would catch the bags and put a small hole it it.
Then, with a little rain and several heavy dews the newspaper inside would
start to get wet. By the time we took down the spider, we decided
that it was better off to throw him away and create a cloth spider for
next year.
The Web
The web consisted of cotton or cotton/polyester blend clothesline for the
main radials of the web, and then lightweight cotton crotchet thread from
the webbing between. We screwed eye hooks into the edge of our roof
and put tent stakes into the ground in a semi-circle pattern around the
front of our house. This made it look like the spider was sitting
in the center of his web waiting for something to come on in. Where
the front walk through the center of the web, we couldn't put any webbing
across (or people would be able to walk in) but we did put webbing down
to the ground so that people wouldn't go wandering off the walk and under
the web.
The Witch
Sue found a picture of a witch stirring her brew that she liked, drew it
on some plywood that Dan cut out and she painted up to be a pretty nice
witch. Don't have any 1995 photos of her.
The Dummy's
We took some old clothes that we had around, and stuffed them with newspaper
to create our family in a front bedroom window. We just stitched
old shoes to pants to sweatshirts to gloves. One each for Sue, Dan and
Abbey. The faces Sue created using an old nylon stuffed with fiber-fill
and then stitches to create indentations for a mouth, eyes, and form a
nose. With a little creative makeup, and hoods on the shirts we used
they didn't look too bad. Not very gruesome, but fun anyway.