Frog on the Pumpkin

be that Cory!?!?! Why yes, yes it is! WooHoo!! Let me introduce everyone to one of my newest, coolest haunt friends! I met him (and his friend Troy (I think I even saw him in the haunt video, can't miss that very cool long hair!) this year at Hauntcon. We had a great time, fun person, great to party with, and very creative. Hope to see him (them) again soon. BTW - makes the coolest fake teeth.....if you ever meet him, ask him to show you, they are sweet! But until then, be sure to take a look at his video for this year's haunt . Nightmare Playground.....spooky, scary, very good - watch it, you will like it.

I was going to give you other ways to enter my drawing ....for an extra entry, hum....something easy to start with....... Okay, name all three of my demon-monster cats (since you might be getting one in the box anyway) for another entry! You can post there names as a comment on this post. :) Remember, click here and leave a comment to be entered to win!

Since we have started decorating the downstairs inside of the shop like a church, you know, to match the facade, I decided to add a luminary to my collection. The idea came about a few years ago at the Rocky Mountain Gathering in Salt Lake City. I was sitting with husband, and John and Jon from EFX-TEK and we were talking about the flickering candle kit they sold. I said I always liked it...but that having to run all the candles together, is a bit of a pain.....if you have candles all over the place, that means you have lots and lots of wire. But what if you made a lot of candles in one place....like that thing they have in church? As we are sitting there trying to remember what they are called, it suddenly dawns on me that there may be hope for me yet....you see, I cannot remember what they are called either....after too many years of Catholic school with an endless stream of church services....I should know this. But I have forgotten.... Yes, I really have forgotten.......YEAH! :D An...

You have all been a great bunch of blogging friends. I have really enjoyed your comments and appreciate your visiting my blog. Many of you have blogs that I also enjoy reading - win-win situation all round! So, for all of you, here is my latest and largest giveaway - I will draw a winner next Thursday. What do you get? You get Davis Graveyard Swag - remember - frog queen is in marketing - swag is my life, that and ROI reports....I know, I have a very, very sad life T-shirt - I have S, M, L, XL - tell me your size Travel Mug - I take mine to every meeting 2008 DVD - the Christopher Walken reading the raven video....I know WTF? I liked it, that is all that matters :D 2007 DVD - this one has ode to Hal...proof that that cat is a frickin' diva! 2006 DVD - award winning video...runner up 2006 Haunt X (now Haunters Video) Awards Davis Graveyard Energy Drink - keep you awake during the zombie attack Custom made Graveyard Soap - cleaning up after the zombie attack Got Zombies Poster...

of their car in full steam punk gear and ask if they can do a photo shoot in the yard. Ah, sure.....sounds fine....BTW - "nice costumes! " (They now have the full attention of every male on the property) :D "Oh, these? Yeah, we are going to go run and change into our goth costumes, we will be right back. " You can hear the minds of all the guys collectively say....."More costumes! Sweet! Feels more like Christmas than Halloween." :D Anyway, they show up about 30 minutes later is these equally amazing goth costumes! Wow! So that the yard will continue to get set up ....Dawn takes them around to the side of the yard where the hearse is, out of sight of the crew. Yeah, there was a big collective *sigh* from the guys, and several of us girls ;) They took lots of pictures with the props all over the yard. It was a lot of fun to watch. We talked for a while and she is going to bring all her gear down for a proper photo shoot next year. I am definitely mentioning...

I want to thank all of you for voting, I really appreciate your help in winning the Home Haunters Association Yard Haunt of the Year, could not have done it without you. That was fun, but I am never doing that again :D Anyway, I want to send a special thanks to to the bloggers that posted on their blogs or forums to help us get more votes. If you are not no this list, and you did, sorry I missed you, email me at chris@davisgraveyard.com and I will be happy to add you to the thank yous :) Thanks Pumpkinrot House Bloodthorn ShellHawk's Nest The Captian Darkrose Manor My Two Yen Worth And thanks to all the other haunters that participated in the contest. There are a lot of great haunts out there and it is always a treat to see the ideas of other haunters! Remember to submit your videos to Propmaster to be part of the Haunters Video DVD collection for 2009 and be entered in the Haunters Video Awards !

the Home Haunters Association Yard Haunt of the Year ? Well, it was not.... the Happy Holiday Home or Demented Dungeon......it was The Davis Graveyard!!!! Yeah, thanks to everyone that votes (special shout to Pumpinrot ) and support. We could not have done it without all of you. So what do we win? - Mr. Skeleton MAX Full Skeleton (Mr. Skeleton) - 1 Yr Subscription to Haunted Attraction Magazine (Haunted Attraction Mag) - DVD Haunting Makeup by Geoff Beck (Haunted Attraction Mag) - Styrofoam Masons DVD by Bad Boys Scenic Design (Haunted Attraction Mag) - Costume Weapon—Double Bit Axe from Scream Line Studios (Haunted Attraction Mag) - Autographed Copy of “How to Haunt Your House” ( HowToHauntYourHouse .com) - Midnight Syndicate Music CD (Midnight Syndicate) - Home Haunters Association Exclusive 1st Place Trophy (Home Haunters Association) We are keeping the trophy (frog queen is calling it a late birthday present :D ), but we are going to give away the prizes through raffles on this blo...

...no, we still don't know the winner of the Home Haunters Association contest.... :( Anyway, here are the far more important awards - the awards (at least some of them) for the Davis Graveyard party. Husband and I forgot to take pictures of them when they were completed and had the plaques on them. :( You will see at the top there the two skeletons, we melted their arms so their hands are touching....ah, they are for the best couple costume....kinda cute huh? Then there were the funny awards that we made for the crew. They are items with a plaque attached on them somewhere. No pictures....you will have to use your imagination :) Messiest Helper - (Plaque will all kinds of graveyard making stuff attached) Elyssa - loves to make things that make a mess.....which is perfect when working with monster mud in large scale...it gets EVERYWHERE :D Best Tour Guide (a megaphone) Tony - my brother, I don't think we could pull on an open house event without him. He is so friendly and he...

was not enough to entice you to move to lovely Milwuakie, Oregon :) How about these pictures....this is from the front lawn of the city hall on Halloween. :) Look familiar? Yeah, we had a tombstone making party at the Davis Graveyard a few weeks before Halloween with the local art committee. (Special thanks to Dan for carving the difficult tombstone with both the City and ArtMOB logos on it.) Husband is chair of the art committee and they thought it would be fun to make tombstones to decorate downtown for their Halloween celebration, it is one step in our plan to bring more Halloween festivities to our city. Next year we are going to attempt to work with our local farmers market to have a scarecrow competition (thanks Pumpkinrot for the info) the week before Halloween. Husband and I have also talked about doing a kids craft party and possibly real/fake pumpkin carving/decorating at the Graveyard or city hall working with a local pumpkin grower and the local craft store. I have many ot...

Do you want to live in an old farm house across the street from the Davis Graveyard? Yeah, I knew you did! Here is your chance. The house across the street from me if for sale. It has a huge sloping yard that would make an even more perfect cemetery than my yard!! And the house is beautiful, they did an amazing job remodeling....if I did not love my house so much...I would move! :) Turn of the century farmhouse on a dividable acre in the city. This 2,088 sf 3 bedroom, 2.1 bath house was extensively renovated in 2004 but the rustic feel remains. New work includes foundation, plumbing, electrical, gas furnace fireplace, sheetrock , cabinets, roof, kitchen and bath tile floors, garden shed, fence and more. If you click on the image below it will take you to Google maps - go to street view. This shows you the side of the house. Press the arrow to the right twice and then when you see a street (43rd - where I live) choose the forward (middle) button to go up 43rd, then press the left arrow ...

with the LOLcats :D (I know that none of you have noticed that, right? :D ) ....it is not my fault....these are just too funny not to post. see more Lolcats and funny pictures see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I put a candle in my head planters....took the pumpkin off first :D I put one in the hands of my Greenman fountain (who is off for the season.)

candlelight. Here are a few more photos from the night before we took down the graveyard. Now, if it would not have been 4am and I would have been thinking straight, I would have brought the tripod with me. Cause taking pictures in the dark, holding the camera....bad idea. Out of the hundreds I took, here are a few that are not too terrible. This is a good idea for next year, during normal "human" hours :D (as husband likes to call them)

does not love and adore the Hauntstyle blog? I know the frog queen and the rest of the graveyard are big fans.....that was until I saw this post . I cannot even post the image....it is too......(shudder) please tell me tat is fake! :D

Wow, really, wow . . . . thanks again to Pumpkinrot for supporting the Davis Graveyard by letting us all know how disappointing 3rd place is :D Sorry Rot, it is sad that anything you make could come in 3rd place :D And a big thanks to both ShellHawk and House Bloodthorn for posting links on their sites. You both are too kind! I am very touched by every one's support. And thanks to everyone who has voted for us, we really appreciate it. It looks like we are in closing in on 2nd place.....a few hundred votes and we can make it to first.... :D I would be honored. Anyway, thanks everyone and who ever wins, congratulations, everyone did a great job on their yard and it shows.

This morning we checked our viewing number on the Home Haunters Association site we were stunned to find the views at 1,249.....they were 745 two days ago. Thanks everyone for viewing....we are holding on to third, possibly second place. :) Not bad . I have viewed all the entries and have to say as always I am impressed and inspired by other haunters. This has been a fun experience. I have to put out a special thanks to my friend Pumpkinrot (and My Two Yen Worth ) for posting links on their blogs and encouraging others to vote for us. The frog queen is touched and honored and cannot thank you enough. I am sure that is the reason we jumped so high so fast. The frog queen has great friends. We still have a few days to go!! Please take a look at the Davis Graveyard submission....and tell everyone you know to do the same, we need about 400 more votes and please remember to rate it 5 stars - rating is very important, if we can get back to a 5 star rating, that will make a huge difference!...

locked in the basement :) I took the opportunity to take another cat free picture of one of my latest treasures! They were wrapped so nicely it was hard to open them :) These are labels from the also lovely (cause remember only beautiful people read this blog - yes, you know you are) All Together Dead . She does an AMAZING party, I want to go! And th ese great labels for all your witch cabinet Halloween needs. And, yes, there is more. She has a great blog. Practically perfect she is! :D Thanks so much. I can hardly wait to start creating containers for all these!!! Oh, yeah, Dorie is STILL in the basement, I think I can hear her scratching on the door....gotta go, I am going to pay for that :D

of this really neat frog (along with some nifty haunt DVDs) that the the lovely Caroline at Caroline's Crafts sent cause she is just that cool! But I know that when I took it out of the box, it had a fishing pole with a cute little fly on it. It is no where to be found. I look around and see that Dorie is sitting in the sink looking down the drain. After a few years of owning this cat....I knew exactly where it was. I reached my hand down the drain, and pulled out the fishing pole. Of course, she thought that I was getting it out for her to play with......so there was a small battle that ended up with her being locked in the basement so I could take this picture. I am taking it to my cat-free office for safe keeping :) Oh, you know......I really should let Dorie out now! :D

it has cats and Frankenstein!!! Just needed a frog and it would go from 99% to 100% perfect :D So what if Kitties did make Frankenstein? You will find out in "Hello Frankenstein." Thanks to Killer Kittens from Beyond the Grave for posting this one. Great site, check it out when you get a chance!

put a link to the video. Husband was talking about this effect (the one I listed below) a couple weeks ago on the lists and the forums ....I am a bit behind :) Here is the video of the new ghost effect.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Well, I think somewhere along the line we decided that keeping four video effects up and running was just too easy, let's try another one :D This is our latest ghost effect. It is four kids running through the very back of the graveyard. We got more comments on this than anything else we did this year. Here is how it works: We took 30 feet (three 10 foot widths sewn together) of black photograph background cloth and put a seam at the top of it so that we could run it through a cable line that extends from the back door of the house to the far right corner of the shop. To hide the background during the day, we pulled it along the cable towards the back door and tied it up - we just untied it and pulled across the year each night we ran the effects. To keep the fabric from blowing in the wind, our fabulous friends came up with the brilliant idea of making long narrow tube sandbags to place all along the bottom. These worked perfectly (except for really windy nights) to keep the fabri...

Here is a group picture from our party this year...this is about 2/3 of the people that attended. We took the picture a bit late....so what you see here is the die hard crew. Gotta love these people! This was after police came so few of or friends might have had to leave or hide :D , and unfortunately a few had to leave early with a sudden case of the flu :D Thanks to our friends and party photographers Cheryl and Roman. They took the picture and even had a poster printed for us. The frog queen has the best friends!!!

Okay, not the exact spider that was on the prop....but likely the same breed. It is one from August....it was a baby then. But November.....they are twice the size and make a nice crunching sound when you squish them :D I cannot believe I just posted a spider picture...gotta go have a glass of wine now :)

does not sound like a lot of fun. So the day of Halloween I had husband and a friend purchase a couple yards of bark dust for the front of the house. It had been raining all week and the cars had drive drive up on the dirt in front of the house. And had just become a muddy , slippery mess. I was worried that people were going to slip and fall, and those pointy bits on the top of my fence are made of metal....scary in the not good way :) (don't even get me started with why we don't have sidewalks....I start foaming at the mouth when it comes to city politics! :D ) The city hates when we use gravel because it ends up in the street. But they seem to be fine with this. Not something that many people budget for when they are setting up there Halloween display! :) Thanks for the donations people, they helped us pay for making everyone safe and a bit less muddy.

large Davis Graveyard sign in my hands, you know that big 4x8 sheet of foam with columns on it. Not particularly heavy, just bulky when you are trying to walk up the stairs. I was following behind the people that were carrying the Joan monument...... So at the first landing the last thing I want to hear is: "You don't want to come up here" Hum, that cannot be good and only mean one thing Spider Okay, don't have to tell me twice, I'll wait. I start playing the anti spider Muzak track in my head....going to my happy place of rainbows and ice cream....... Obviously the music was not loud enough... I can hear them running around discussing how to catch it to set it free...(I have great friends, not only are they helping me put props away...they are rescuing me from a spider.) "You hold this....I am going to get that.....wow, that is a big.....damn, that is a big spider!" "Chris, you seriously do not want to come up here." As if I was even thinking...

tombstone?" I get asked this a lot during the season by visitors to the graveyard. I used to be honest about it.....but when I told people which one, they all went "Huh, what, I didn't get that one?" Even when I explained it they all looked at me like "Huh? okay, whatever." (likely muttering "crazy lady" as they walked away.) :D So, for visitors, my favorite tombstone varies from day to day. I think by the end of the season I had them all covered :D So in honor of Friday the 13th, here is a picture of my favorite tombstone. It is a reference to Friday the 13th the series . What? I hear you say? Yeah, I think I was one of only 100 people that actually watched the show :D Lewis Vendredi was the owner of the shop that sold the cursed objects and died when he tried to break his pact with the devil. "By the moon as it passes through it's stages, I put a curse upon these pages." The saying is something I found...I had a hard time coming up...

I am actually ashamed of myself. :( Very bad frog queen. Several times I have started this and felt bad that it was so late that I just wimped out and I didn't do it! But I cannot let the fabulous PumpkinBrain down any longer!! Let me tell you the story of one of the most unique and rewarding prop experiences I have ever had. I am not sure if you remember, but earlier in the year I was pining on about what to do with the old angel prop. She had had three or four different wing incarnations and several other modifications.....and I was just not happy with her. It was time to start over. So, I worked on the plans for the new angel - half skeleton half person - and she came out spectacular - thanks to everyone who helped with that one. But then, what to do with old angel? I mentioned that since she was holding a sword and her wings were off, she sorta looked like Joan of Arc. But what to do make the transition. Out of the blue the very nice PumpkinBrian offered his help. Since he kn...

Spiders, but this is a cool one. I originally ordered this for a door prize for my Halloween party. Note, I said, ordered. I apparently forgot the paying step . Very bad frog queen. I blame it on the madness that is October :) Anyway, the very patient Melissa worked with me and we got everything sorted. Except that it was too late for to make it for a party gift. :( Oh no, I am going to have to keep it, isn't that terrible! - Hee, hee! ;D Anyway, it is a cool thaumatrope with the web on one side and the spider on the other from the very talented Mellisa the Holiday Queen . She has a great blog and Etsy store . Check it out when you get the chance. That being said, I have updated my Etsy shop recommendation to her site - go get yourself some holiday items. They are beautiful! BTW - since my Dorie cat really wants to eat the ribbon on this, I am afraid of spiders....and it was originally meant as a door prize, I am going to add it to my upcoming follower appreciation giveaway th...

I am not a big fan of voting by committee thing for awards....but we are going to try this again. Help the Davis Graveyard win the Home Haunters Association award for Yard Haunt of the year. I know it is a tough decision, there are some great haunts out there.....but in your heart you know you will make the right choice :D And vote five stars :D Go to our YouTube video and watch it, all the way through, so it counts as a view and then rate it and leave glowing comments!!! :D ....that is just beginning..... please get every person you know to do the same thing !!!! I think the highest rated video is not at 1,300 views, we only have 60....we have a long way to go. 2009 Home Haunters Association Video After you see that, and you become worried....no, that is not the official Davis Graveyard video...we just put that together to meet the deadline last night. We have all of December to edit and bicker :) over the "official" video for the Haunters Video DVDs that Propmaster does. Mo...

Veteran's Day. Here is the tombstone that is in my yard for my Grandmother who was a welder during World War II - She has been gone almost two years now, I miss her very much. I know she would be thrilled to find a tombstone for her in the yard....she loved working on our props :D