I Want This.

Scarydad September 10, 2013 No Comments

NBC20While I allow the current coat of paint to dry on my Jack Skellington project, I figured I’d do a little early Christmas shopping for myself. For those of you in an I-want-to-buy-stuff-for-Scarydad mood, here is my latest list of desired loot. We start of tonight with this, The Nightmare Before Christmas: 20th Anniversary Edition. This is the original short story/poem that Tim Burton wrote that later became the stop-motion animation classic we all know and love. I can’t believe it’s already been 20 years. I remember, I guess it had to be around 20 years ago. My buddy Chris and I were talking and I asked him whet he had planned for the weekend and he said, “I think we’re going to check out that Nightmare Before Christmas movie.”

Damn. That makes me feel really old.

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Dia De Los Meurtos: Tucson Style

Scarydad September 6, 2013 No Comments
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From the glaring eyes of a cd skeleton blasts pop music; Halloween music- music that gets the crowd stepping in rhythm, as much as a crowd can. There are ice sculptures shaped like bones, bones shaped into full skeletons, and skeletons masquerading as people. As I look out across the crowd, my own face painted a bright bone white, I see that I (in my all-black clothes and glow-in-the-dark skeleton tights) am, if anything, under dressed. At Tucson, Arizona’s All Soul’s Processional, there is no such thing as a Halloween costume—the creations on these bodies are months in the making and worn well after the holiday.

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Scarydad Rant

Scarydad September 5, 2013 No Comments

I need a hug.

My Nightmare Before Christmas project is giving me pains tonight. Literal pains in which my hand hurts from pinching it in a folding saw horse. But the pinching is not the problem. Crappy plywood is the problem.

Plywood is not cheap. Or rather, it’s not inexpensive. The last couple sheets I got, despite costing the same as it ever does, are damn cheap. It’s brittle and knotty and has a tendency to split or crack for no good reason. So, basically I’ve been working my tail off the past two evenings with the result of having a bunch of useless wood scraps and a half-ass looking Jack with no arm, hand, bow tie, or coattails.

I’m going to have to get a whole ‘nother piece of plywood and start over tomorrow afternoon. Which sucks because I had hoped to be done with that phase by now.

This is why I always suggest you start early on your projects. You never know when the hand you’ve been working on for an hour will decide to split off and shatter on the ground for no apparent reason.

Live and learn.

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Nightmare Before Christmas Yard Decoration Project Part 1: Sally

Scarydad September 2, 2013 4 Comments

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Happy Labor Day everyone. Recently I spoke of a ginormous project I had undertaken and how it was taking up more time than expected. What it will eventually be is several large plywood cutouts of various characters from The Nightmare Before Christmas. So, rather than wait however long it’s going to take until this project is complete, I’m just going to show you each character as I complete it. The first of these is Sally the rag doll.

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