Frog on the Pumpkin

post pictures on Monday....hummmm, it is Tuesday morning...I am only off by 7 hours or so :) Anyway, here are the finished pictures of Sleeping Beauty.  She got sponge coat of white to bring out the details (thank Elyssa) and then I hand painted all the dark drip marks on the edges.  She is on her way upstairs for a few weeks until she comes back down for set up. Really looking forward to seeing this one out in the yard with all the other props.

I just need to get him a sword and we are good to go. :D So we "peeled" Joe out of his original mudded fabric* (which was fun) so we could try him in cheese cloth. We had to remove some hardware that would show through the thinner material and I decided to lift his hands up to put a bowl or something there. Cheese cloth is really fun to mud, I like they way it looks and it is easier to work with than I thought.  It looks great on the body and the shoulders, but I can see now that the head will need few more layers to make it look like it is a shroud and not chain mail :D * Now, I have not given up on the brilliant idea of the skeleton nativity scene.  We have been talking about doing a full size one in the yard, the back yard, one day.....maybe soon.  A small one might be easier to manage and less chance of the neighbors seeing it and picketing the house :D

When I did the last post about refurbishing Beloved.  She was leaning on a paint can and not on her base. Here she is finished and ready to go back up stairs (out of the way) for a few weeks. So the oldest prop in the yard still lives.  What is the 10th anniversary gift? :D Wait a minute...... You know what? I just noticed in this picture.....her left arm is too long, the one outstretched....it is, isn't it?   It also looks like she has been working her left arm bicep when we are not looking. Crap! (*&$@!!! I am going to have to cut the arm at the shoulder and move it in towards her body.....oh that is going to be loads of fun. It takes me 10 years to notice that.  I need to be fired from prop making :)

who turned out the lights, and how come I cannot see my hand? First coat of paint on my latest folly. I am keeping this one, because I have learned so many things NOT to do on this one, and I am not even finished yet. Seemed like a simple idea.....that should have been my first clue.

but if not....you should have downloaded and listen to the latest Hauntcast .  We loves our Hauntcast . Interview with Ed is very awesome....and now I am waxing all nostalgic for my old plastic Halloween costume....thanks ShellHawk. :)

Spirit store and our local party shop and pick up door prizes for the party.  Everyone seemed happy with their cheesy cheap plastic Halloween toy/prop.  But I would notice that every year, a prize or two would be left behind, the person was having too much fun and forgot to grab their winnings on the way out.  No worries, I recycled them back into the box for next year. Then I stared blogging and found that many of you cool bloggers have Etsy shops.  I thought, why give my money to some retail store when I have spend it on cooler stuff and support artists.  At first I thought that this might be too much for our crowd.  After many years of feeding them cheap plastic stuff as prizes, how where they going to handle this new found sophistication. I was worried they were going to look at the table and go.....WTF?  So I added a few cheap plastic things just to be sure :) But you know what happened?  To my surprise not a single prize was left ...

how much longer I can hold him!!! :)

it away as a birthday present. I got a friend of mine one of the cool cloaked pumpkin figures over at Pumpkin Hollow Etsy shoppe. No, I am not keeping for myself, really?  Why does no one trust me? :) As usual, the cats enjoyed the box.  Dorie especially liked the three plastic spiders in the box.  (sorry the pictures are so blurry, tripod was not set up and I had the camera set for other pictures and did not have time to set it back.) Sometimes I have this funny feeling that you are putting spiders in my shipments on purpose. :)

Here is the almost finished "Sleeping Beauty" prop.  She looks very lonely without all the other props in the yard. I am going to finish her up this weekend.  She needs to be hand painted to make it look aged and bring out the details.  Finished pictures will be posted on Monday. I like her so much that I am thinking of making small desktop sized versions.  Yes, the Frog Queen follies are running rampant! :D

lately....so on my list of cool gifts I have been getting I need to mention this wonderful box of goodies from Mr. Macabre .  If you have not checked out his blog, you need to go right now....don't worry I will wait. :D  He makes some amazing props and has a great sense of humor....my type of person. So let's see what he sent me....chips and popcorn and mints and cool candle jar and tea....oh my! He sent it just because! My favorite part of this whole bag of loot (and that was hard to do cause there is a lot to love) is the frog soap!!  Awesome.  Almost don't want to use it it is so cool, but it smells fantastic and really looking forward to trying it out. Thanks Mr. Macabre , you are the best!!

and little frogs.  Got this from my lovely minion Dawn - it is a lucky little frog thing.  Awfully cute.  Cute? Hummm.... Maybe this is why I don't post many frogs, cute is not really my thing.   But I love him anyway....and so do the cats!   That pumpkin was not the only thing that I found under the couch :D

related to Halloween....unless you count that we do a Dr. Horrible sing along at our party.  Yes, I am going to go with that. Anyway, my very nice friends got this for me as a gift "just because" The Frog Queen does have the best friends!

my office might be the only safe place for him. Isn't he cute? He is one of those lovely pumpkins that Ghoul Friday makes. He arrived at the house a while ago and immediately went MIA. Now, the FQ is completely unorganized and really wanted to believe that I had just put it away for safe keeping somewhere and I would find when I moved the offices. Offices moved. Still no pumpkin. hummmmmmm...... I had to admit to myself what really happened. The cats got him..... since I had not seen him in a while so that meant only one thing.....the poor guy was under a piece of furniture......just out of paw reach from Mason. (Mason is the largest cat, if he could not reach it, none of the others could.) So, Mason's favorite place is the sofa in the music room. We start the quest there. Success , the poor guy was found. He was under the couch, by the window, looks like he had been crying himself to sleep at night. Ah, that is too sad. I gotta make this up to hi...

enough frog posts on this blog....for saying I am the Frog Queen you would think that I would post a frog or two now and again. I have been slacking.  So how about we start small.....very, very small. Microhyla A freshly metamorphosed new species of a mini frog, named Microhyla nepenthicola, sits on a penny in this undated handout photo released to Reuters by Dr Indraneil Das of Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation August 25, 2010. Scientists have discovered a frog the size of a pea, the smallest found in Asia, Africa or Europe, on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo. Very cute.  My cats would love him....as a snack :)  This is why there are nor will be real frogs in my home realm. (Thanks to BB for the heads up!) Back to prop building!

And it looks something like the picture on the side of this box.  How did he know!?! The picture on the other side is much better :) So where is the spider?  Check it out over at the SpiderFEST 2010 blog .  Go right now.....It is amazing!!

a girly girl.  We all know that I really dislike pink and fluffy, ruffly stuff.  But I do like kitties.  That is about as soft and fuzzy as I get. So husband jumped at the chance to get a photo of me, as he puts it "playing with dolls". Fair enough, these dolls happen to be small skeletons.  And I was not tarting them up (working on my UK references) up in skimpy clothes and driving her around in a pink car like Barbie.  Although, them, like Barbie look like they could use a sandwich. So, for a couple years now I have been plotting small statues like the ones I create in full scale for the yard.  But I never did anything. And now, not to in anyway insult the artist I am about to mention, cause his work is amazing and mine is not...but William Bezeks dolls just gave me the umph I needed to get off my ass, get out in the shop and make one of these things, finally. (Thanks sir!  See people, this is why I blog...you never know where you will find yo...

"we need to get this for miss Chris cause she loves spiders" I think he has that backwards, but what is a girl to do when very cute minion gives her a present like this. In my head I was screaming and thinking....what kind of sick person would create something like this :D If you read the box, they even designed it with at "spider hideaway" at the top to keep the spider safe!  Damn thoughtful creators....thoughtful for the spiders, not for the FQ. Luckily he gave it to me in a cute Toys R' Us trick or treat bag, so I did not have to touch it. And Daniel was nice enough to take it out of the box and put it in the yard for me.....thanks Dan, I think it is thanks I am feeling. I did not look when I was headed out this morning....but I bet there is a spider in it already.

the yard.  When we taught our latest Davis Graveyard Overview class I wanted to make a sample of monster mud with fabric.  I have a small monk that is finished on one side chicken wire on the other to show how we make the larger ones. But I get a lot of questions about Beloved and the angel props.  Well, making a small angel just did not sound like something I could do easily, I thought, what about just a ghost. You know the kids costume of a kid with a sheet and eye holes. So I made a cute little ghost, which for some reason I have never managed to post on the blog, sorry about that.  But I do plan on making them for our upcoming Etsy store. He was very popular at the convention (I think Leonard even said they would make good centerpices for Hauntcon) and got me thinking about  something similar in full size. Husband loved the idea so we worked on it together.  We talked to Mike a Ghost Ride (who came to the convention.) to see if...

is a scary place indeed.

Welcome my fellow bloggers to a frog queen folly I like to call "meet the Halloween/horror obsessed blogger" - and I mean that in the nicest way :) This is opportunity for you to learn more about your favorite Halloween"ish" bloggers and me to get more information from them without making it look like the stalker that I am. So, my first victim, I mean volunteer is The Captain ...aka Jason. I know we have all been dying to chat with you and find out what makes a normal human being become obsessed with Halloween? There are a whole lot of other holidays, why the obsession with Halloween decorating? I’ve loved Halloween since I was a kid. I blame err no I mean contribute most of my love of the holiday to my childhood neighbors the Kutchs. They would always have really cool parties on Halloween. All of us kids would decorate the yard with webs in this big walnut tree and make dummies out of old clothes and last year’s masks. (I’m not in this picture but the w...

because I want to see how she pulls off a online costume contest! :D No, not really.  They very cool Courtney over at Haunt Jaunts is hosting a party this October....and I just love parties even if it is just an online party....virtual martinis are not the same :D So won't you all join me in being part of the the HJ Halloween Spooktackular Halloween Blog Party ?  Come hang out with the Frog Queen we will have a great time.

doing interviews for both Carl at I Like Horror Movies and Max at The Drunken Severed Head blogs last year that I got the idea to do this on my blog. Kinda meet the haunt bloggers kinda thing.....but like all Frog Queen follies they take a while to actually materialize.  I can tell you that me and the blogger we are feature on the first edition have been talking about doing this for about......oh, well,  less than a year.  How is that.  That is actually good for me. We have been talking about a book for five years....so I am getting better :) Anyway, here at the Frog Queen realm we are going to feature interviews with some of our favorite Halloween/Haunt/Horror bloggers.  The first post will be this Sunday. So, guess who we are going to feature first?  Guess?

Davis Graveyard Drive In. We call it that, even though you don't actually sit in your car....but you do have to drive to the house. :)  FG logic is quite silly. We set up  a projector on the patio and pull down the screen and show movies.  Usually bad movies.  But there is drinking involved and it usually turns into more of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 thing anyway. Tonight the double feature consist of: Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (cause FQ loves her Hammer films, yes she does!) Horst's costume is awesome! :D And the second feature was going to be Lair of the White Worm....but husband says it is too weird :(  So we are going for something more mainstream like Thirteen Ghosts (remake) - which I dislike (yeah, I can hear you gasping in disbelief from here) but it does get better after a few martinis :)   I do like the guy getting cut in half with the glass door.  Nice! I might try to convince everyone to ...

spider in the Davis Graveyard Spiderfest 2010. Isn't he just the cutest creepiest scariest thing you have ever seen. So this thing is really going to happen isn't it? Yikes! :D Thanks Mr. Chicken , I am very, very honored.