fter years of wanting a good Halloween Tree, without ever being quite sure what one was, I finally too matters into my own hand and constructed one during October 2003. This page houses the various updates in which I detailed the construction process, with numerous photos.

You can see a page with fewer words and more pictures of the tree here, in the photos section.

September 29, 2003

After the IHOP, Malaya wanted to stop by the Halloween Party Store that we'd passed on the way there, and I was game.  We spend half an hour most every shopping trip in an art or crafts store, usually Michael's, and it's not bad.  I seldom get anything, but we enjoy seeing the silk foliage or Halloween stuff or cool crafts projects that we could use to fix up our condo.  This time was no different, except that we had to browse through pretty much the entire store, since there was like, Halloween stuff everywhere.  99% of it shit or junk, but hey, at least it's shit and junk that we haven't seen before.  At least not this year.

That store didn't really have what we wanted, but it had some cool stuff.  However there was a larger Halloween Superstore on the way home, and we hit that one and saw a bunch of stuff we almost bought, but nothing that was quite good enough to compel us to spend money.  Next door to that store was another arts/crafts store, and it had a good selection of Halloween loot.  It was at this time that I first began to appreciate some of the new Halloween things, namely the concept of the Halloween tree.

I have always liked Halloween, even though I never really do anything to celebrate it. I like horror and death and evil and witches and ghosts and all of that good stuff, but since I never really celebrate anything, my like has been pretty much an idle thing. Malaya is a lot more active in her love for the holiday season, and she's pulling me into it along with her.  Not that she buys a ton of stuff, but her enthusiasm is as infectious as a flesh-eating bacteria, and once I get to looking, and thinking about how I only have to pay 1/2 the price of stuff, a lot of the nifty Halloween decoration stuff seems much more interesting.  Hence the Halloween tree.

They are like Xmas trees, but either black metal, or a modeled dead tree, cemetery/full moon styled.  They come hung with ghosts or devils or witches, and usually with a bristling display of gravestones over their roots. Plus there are little packs of Halloween ornaments of every type, black cats, ghosts, demons, bats, etc, which you can hang on your tree or key ring or just tape to a wall.  I suppose I'd seen such objects in years past, but they had never penetrated my consciousness until now.

Unfortunately, the ones at both of those stores sucked, and then when we hit Michael's and Target later on the way home, they didn't have anything we wanted either, in terms of Halloween stuff.  The only trees we saw were very simple things all off metal, with snail-shell style spirals at the end of a dozen black twists of metal.  Basically they are low grade clothes hangers that have been painted black and formed in unimaginative fashion.

Malaya claims to have seen a really good tree for sale somewhere, possibly at the first store we hit by the IHOP, but I have no memory of seeing a good one yet.  I am tempted to make one, either by twisting up a dozen coat hangers into creepy dead tree-type designs, or by forming actual tree fragments.  Malaya says we could get a nice piece of the baked branches they sell at fish stores and mount that on one end and hang stuff from it, and that's not a bad idea either.  It's certainly less work.

I don't know what we're going to do, but I'm interested in getting or making something and then decorating it.  We've been eyeing Christmas ornaments and such as well, well in advance, though with our two kitties we have to take into account that pretty much anything we set up needs to be swat-proof.

October 6, 2003

One thing that we both noticed then, and have been noticing as we shop for cool Halloween Tree ornaments is how lame most of them are.  And by "lame" I mean "not even remotely scary."

I suppose this Disneyification of Halloween was inevitable, as the holiday has become more and more mainstream, but that doesn't make me happy about it.  What I'm talking about are the little decorations and miniatures; ghost and goblins (actually I've yet to see anything anywhere that resembles a goblin) and witches and skulls and etc... they're all ridiculously cute.  All smiling and cute faces, no blood or bones or anything unsuitable for 5 year olds.  You can still see some sort of scary stuff at Halloween stores, but just in terms of masks or larger decorations. All of the tiny little collectibles, the types of things we want to hang on our Halloween tree, are just absurd.

Some cute stuff, for people stuck with kids who can't handle reality, is fine, especially in silly places like the Halloween display at a Hallmark store.  But must all of it be so watered down and cutesy?  It's like fricking Easter with black bunnies and duckies.

Lots of the stores have these cute Spooky Hollow miniature figures meant to be hung from something, like very small Xmas ornaments. They come in boxes of about a dozen for about $15, pretty affordable.  The problem is that while there are 4 or 6 good ones per box, the rest are like happy little witches, or laughing ghosts, or cute black kitties, etc.  We don't want to buy a box of stuff when half of it is too mood-killing to display.  My idea is that we get that and then give away the happy ones, or just don't display them, or hell, destroy them.  Partially melt them to make them creepy, paint their faces black, cut off their heads or arms, and so on.

The whole Halloween Tree project has come to a halt the last few days since we got a golden wire Xmas tree, with plans to distress it and bend the wire curls into creepy shapes and glue bits of wood to it to ugly it up and then paint it all flat black.  The tree and wood and paint are here, but I've been distracted with other stuff and haven't gotten to spend any daylight hours screwing with it. I want to take some pictures of the process, though I'm pretty sure the end result will be more amateurish/home made/cheesy than it will be thematic and creepy.  Like a project far too lame to even be included on the Cockeyed page. *sigh*

Since the final fate of the Halloween Tree is likely going to be a kitty punching bag, I'm not sure why we're so worried about the appearance anyway.  It's just something to do, and I like to decorate since Malaya enjoys it, and she likes to decorate since I enjoy it.  Funny how that works.

October 10, 2003

As I've mentioned several times over the last couple of weeks, Malaya and I are doing some Halloween decorating, and for the centerpiece we naturally desire a Halloween Tree.  Well, actually we desire a living leprechaun werewolf held prisoner in a small wrought-iron cage and bound with silver-coated titanium chains, but that's a bit out of our budget for now.

So we're settling for a Halloween Tree.  What's that, you ask? Well, through the magic of Google I found one that's not far off, and it's on the Barbie site, of all places.  It's pretty low-rent, just a couple of dead branches in a pot, but it's a simple concept.  I haven't seen any that simple in the stores; most are larger, overpriced, and corny. Like this thing, for instance. It's like something your grandmother would think was cool.  All I wanted was something like a small decorative Christmas tree, just all ugly and dead and leafless (needle-less?) and with twisted, gnarled branches suitable for hanging creepy ornaments from. We saw several metal ones that weren't too far off, they were black and made of clothes hanger-like metal pipes, but they were too simple, just little twists of metal.

I can't find the exact tree we purchased online, but it looks a bit like the second row on this page. Ours was was far cheaper though, and as you can see, it's just a simple design.  There are 16 of the clothes hanger-thickness metal bars, and four of them peel off into a spiral every six inches or so.  It's actually a pretty good design, since it makes the trunk taper as it ascends, just like a real tree.  There are coils of a smaller metal pipe around the tree just below each set of "branches" to hold the whole thing together, and the base is made up of four much thicker bars.  That's actually sort of a pain, since I wanted to twist them around as well, to simulate old roots, but they're too thick to bend without a bench vise or extensive straining, and I'm afraid I'd just break them off.

The branches, on the other hand, are easy meat.  They are just about identical to clothes hangers (and may have begun life as them, for all I can tell) and can easily be bent by hand, though I wore gloves for some bruise-prevention and used pliers for some of the finer bends.  Most of which proved irrelevant, as I'll discuss below.

I tried to keep the branches spaced somewhat evenly, but not so neat that it would look fake.  The idea is that it's an old, dead tree, ideally one growing over a desecrated graveyard.  Some hanging moss and perching crows wouldn't hurt either.  Such trees invariably have a lot fewer branches than our tree, but real trees also have thick trunks, real bark, weigh several tons, and stand over 50 feet tall, so since we want something to put on our living room shelf, we're making modifications where necessary.

As you can see it's been bent and mangled a lot and looks funky, but it's far from suitable as of now.  It's ugly, but far too golden (mostly due to the flash, it's more of a bronze in person) to pass for more than an avant-garde Xmas tree art sculpture.

This will change.

My idea all along was to bend and distort it, and then glue or fasten bits of actual wood onto it, before painting the whole thing jet black.  To do that I obviously need the metal tree, black paint, a bunch of bits of wood, and something to fasten them on with.

The wood was easily-obtained; they have little decorative wreaths at every crafts store for low prices.  You can see a close up of one below that cost me $3.  It has enough wood to make about 20 of these things, though many of the branches are too slender for my needs, and since they all go in a circle, you have to work to alternate the patterns to avoid a sort of whirlpool pattern to the tree.

A can of flat black spray paint was about $5 at a hardware store, and while I initially planned to use glue to hold the pieces on, I abandoned that when I began to work and realized that I'd be putting wood on top of wood and bending the metal a lot more and didn't want to wait for glue to dry.  So I just grabbed a fistful of paper clips and cut them in half.  They are pretty easy to bend around the wooden sticks and the metal tree, though you need needle nose pliers to get them really tight.

The paperclips are sort of hard to work with though, so on our last trip to a discount crafts store, we got a variety pack of metal wire.  Twelve spools of all different colors for $3.  They aren't sturdy enough to do heavy work with, but they should be more than enough to hold the twigs onto my tree with.

You can see how things looked after day one in the shots below.  The metal frame is still easily-visible, but I'd spent about 45 minutes applying wooden its to the metal frame and it was starting to take shape.  Literally.

My initial work on the metal frame was far too painstaking, I realized as I began to apply the wood. I could have used it just as it was, but I'd have had to tie on pieces of wood less than a finger in length, and that would have been way too much trouble.  Plus it would have looked silly to have so many branches extending such a short distance from the tree while bending around so much.

Therefore, once I began putting on the sticks, I pulled most of the metal limbs out straighter than I had initially intended, and then fit 4 or 6 or 8 inch pieces of actual wood to them, tying most of them in two places for stability.

I had covered a lot less than half of the tree at the time of the photos here, stopping when it was too dark outside to do more detail work.

The next afternoon I spent another 30 or 45 minutes adding on more bits of wooden branch.  You can see a shot from near the end of my work time below on the left, with a shot of my whole work area to the right.  As you can see, the wooden wreath isn't diminished at all by the work to date.  It's actually running out of branches large enough for my purpose; most of the wreath is made of twigs, so I'm probably going to go walk around the grounds and scrounge up some more sticks from the wooded area around our condo.

I mean that literally. As I start to pull out one single branch it proves to be more than six feet long, growing in neat circles around and around inside of the wreath, and as far as I can tell, the whole thing is like that. So they somehow grow these things like this, or else harvest some long, springy vines and wind them around something to get them into this wreath shape, and let them grow for a while in that form, since there are little tendrils and small branches that have grown all through and around the other limbs. It's sort of creepy, really.

I'll post more shots of this project as it continues, and I figure I'll have the rest of the wood on it this weekend, and then we'll paint it and see how it looks black, and if I need to add more wooden bits on then.  Once it's painted and sculpted properly we'll hang our ornaments, and need to buy some more of them as well, I think.  I dunno how cool it will look eventually, but it's fun to play with it now, and fun to make our own thing from cheap ingredients, especially since we like it better than the factory-produced stuff we've seen in the stores.

November 1, 2003

I've blogged about this thing in the past, during the planning and construction process, so I'm not going to recap here. I'll just collect all of the info on the Halloween Tree page for future reference, so hold your breath until that appears, or just hunt back through the past 2 or 3 weeks for mentions of this damn decorating project, if you've somehow forgotten what I was talking about already.

Basically, I bought a decorative swirled metal Xmas tree and mutated it with pliers and strong fingers, and then set about to fasten sticks and twigs to it along the metal limbs, thus making it look more natural.  The plan was then to spray paint it black and cover it with various Halloween type decorations.  As of the last update I had finished about half of the branch application process, so we pick up there.

I spent some more time bending the branches (mostly making them straighter, removing a lot of the kinks and twist I'd put in) and then finished applying the branches to it, eventually adding twigs to at least 95% of the metal, and extending the sticks well off to the ends of the wire in numerous places.  You can see the finished model below, both before and during the spray painting process.

The painting was easy; I just used a paper clip to hook an upper limb and turn it around after spraying at it from every angle, and in about five minutes the whole thing was done.  I left it to dry overnight and then painted it upside down the next day, holding it by one of the legs.  Lots of the bottoms of branches were still brown and brass, so this was necessary. I did some sideways touch up the next day, and while it's far from perfectly ebony over every square cm, that's okay.  It's supposed to look a little ragged.

With the painting finished the decoration could begin.

We had a bag of mixed Halloween things that cost us about $3 at Michael's, and that came in very handy.  It provided all of the orange spiders, the five finger puppet evil figures, the five larger plastic spiders, the bats, and the few black spiders we put on top of the cotton spiderwebs.  A bag of those, of which we used about 1/20th, was like $1.50, and I twisted craft wire around several other ornaments, decorative rocks and such that I got for about $1 each, and hung those as well.

Here you see a couple of shots of the completed thing, sitting on our bed since the kitties wouldn't leave me alone long enough to take any photos of it on the floor, and I was able to lock them out of the bedroom for long enough to take these shots.  Or mostly lock them out, as the next two photos attest.

I only covered one face of it with the cotton spiderwebs, thinking that it would be cool to have a different look from side to side, and also that I didn't want to bury all of my nice wood work and decorations beneath obscuring cotton strands.

Malaya's idea was to put some of the black plastic ring spiders on top of the white spiderwebbing, but I didn't put the stuff on heavily enough to make the black ones on top of it visible, so that plan was scratched for now.  Perhaps next year, if we dig it out and make some modifications before display?

 

Does Jinx like it?  Does she smack at it if given any chance whatsoever?

Of course she does.

Isn't she cute as she does herself permanent brain damage from the paint fumes?

Of course she is.

 

More pictures may be added when the tree makes an appearance for Halloween 2004.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.