The Haunt at Hellizondo

YAY! This weekend marked the glorious return of Zac and Tricia to the haunted garage! A lot got done, and progress was made.

Zac finished the mermaid build up and the paper mache all in one weekend. Full steam ahead!

Kendra finished up the mache on the gryphon body on Saturday, and mached the wings, hands, and other odds and ends on Sunday.

Trica bulked up and started mache on her abomination to God and all that is decent in the World this weekend. I didn’t get a shot of the mache, but She’ll be wrapping it up next weekend, I’ll snap some shots then.

Patty has been working on the head to her carousel creature. 10 straight work days hasn’t kept her from kicking ass. I think this week she’ll be adding lips and teeth, so it’s gonna look pretty cool next week (and less birdlike)!

What a nice summer day in the garden indeed, butterflies flitting about, birds bathing in the fountain, and praying mantis crawling up your leg. These guys are standing here so I can block in the prop that goes between them. This prop:

Anyone hungry for hotdogs?

Here is a close up of the characters from earlier this week:

Happy birthday to Zac who turned 29 on Monday! We went to the Mummies of the World exhibit at the California Science Center on Saturday for Zac’s birthday. Dead people really do look like paper mache. I got a great book about the exhibit that is like 4 inches thick and has tons of pictures of decay, mummies, and other creepy stuff.

On Sunday Kendra and Patty got started on the mache of their carousel creatures. I forgot to bring my camera, so there is only a few pics from my phone, whose battery was near dead.

I worked on the carousel, finishing the construction of the assembly linkages. I have built it to break down into 7 easily stored pieces that go together like a puzzle in about 30 minutes. Here’s me fitting the top:

There is still a long way to go on this carousel, and it is eating up a lot of our build time. One more hour of work next week, and then it will just be a matter of  decoration and painting. The fun part.

We are down two builders this year (at least for now) and we might have to scale back. I am fighting to finish all the things we have planned. To get it all done, I will have to work at home on the weeknights doing anything and everything I can. I have been working out the build schedule,  I’ll post a screenshot when I’m done. It’s gonna be way worse than last year’s schedule.

This week I took off Friday to work in the garage with Patty on her day off. It was a nice day and we got alot done. We nearly completed the pre-mache build of our carousel creatures.

My dragon got  wings, a tail, and some feet.

Patty’s Pony of Doom got very close to being finished also.

On Saturday Kendra came out and nearly finished her Gryphon/Griffin.

I got started on another extra evil skeleton.

I also redid the skeleton build up of the Mermaid, which was too small in comparison to the other creatures. I gave it little creepy arms and hands. I also added a larger fan like tail.

This weekend was very productive even with a birthday and low attendance on Sunday. Saturday was Tricia’s birthday, she turned 24. Happy Birthday Trish! Thanks to vicoden I was able to carefully work on finishing the frame of the carousel so now with about 1 hours worth of installing some bolts and shaving two pieces of wood, we’ll be ready to start wallpapering and painting the carousel. Patty has been working on the fabric top for the caorsel, and she laid out some colors to look at. We decided to limit the colors to red, gold,orange, and black. Purple made it just a bit too colorful.

Kendra made big progress on her Gryphon. I helped bend some wings out of PVC, and showed her how to connect the ribs to the pelvis, (it her first creature ever made). She also made some feet and claws.  Next week we’ll make some wings, give it some feathers around the head, and add a tail too.

On Sunday afternoon I got some work done on my dragon. I gave it little stubby legs, bent some PVC for wings and a tail. Monday Night I added some more details to the heads.

Patty is almost done with her cannon. She made some wheels and added the fuse holder. Now she must add tires and pimps it out with bling. I bet it will be done this weekend.

We harvested some pumpkins from Patty’s garden. The patch has gone wild, so we had cut these ripe pumpkins to make room for the others growing next to them. If these last, we should have around 20 pumpkins by the big day. I love pumpkin patches…sigh.