Ghosts in the Graveyard

 Here's a favorite project of mine this year! My original idea, the first idea, was to make Edgar Allan Poe's gravesite atop a stack of books. Poe may or may not be buried in this little graveyard but I kept the idea of using a stack of books. It's the closest I've gotten to doing another altered book in a long time so I'm counting it as a goal accomplished! 

Ghosts in the Graveyard:  A couple years ago I set up a party scape with a stack of books with titles that I thought reflected the Halloween mood. I had about 5 or 6 of them and I thought at the time of attaching them all together to make a permanent arrangement. Since I never got around to it, I decided to take from that stack and use a few for this display.

I won't take you through every little step but I'll try to point out a few things through the photos of the finished project. I relied heavily on items from Tim Holtz's Halloween lines of Ideaology. These are a variety of items some from my stash; some I bought brand new this year. My vision for the graveyard really took off when I realized the Metal Fence fit "just so" on the top book I was using for my base.

This photo gives a good depiction of the graveyard. I covered the book with a sheet of  paper from Tim Holtz's Abandoned stash. (So happy that I finally got my hands on this paper stash! It is mesmerizing how much pattern and color is in it. Truly a sheet for any project.) Those rocks are some kind of foam bead that I had in my stash and never used. Its a good filler when you're attaching large items with texture paste as it fills in the gaps. I just spread on the texture paste and lightly pressed these into it. Mummy cloth adds a bit of light fog around the edges and the brush bottle trees in the back were sprayed with several different shades of ink to fit my color palette. While I used some Evergreen Bough, Shaded Lilac, and Gathered Twigs (Distress stain), my main color was Whale Watch Blue from Lindy's. This cold blue-gray color was exactly what I wanted to reflect a foggy chilly Halloween night. I sprayed the texture paste and foam beads with this color and the mummy cloth to match.

I added details to the tombstones in the front. I placed a creepy eye on one and set a skull beside the other. I added small ruby rhinestones into the skulls eyes, the only deviation from my washed out color palette. If you look closely at the gravestones in the back row, just before the trees, they may seem familiar. I used old chess pieces. I took the black ones and gave them a little coat of gray paint then added little splotches of black to make them seem old and weathered. I colored a pearl with purple alcohol ink to set atop the rook to resemble a gazing ball.

I added the ghosts after staring at it awhile and deciding I wanted a vertical element. It was feeling very "horizontal"...your eye tracked left and right but not up and down. The ghosts helped with that and I LOVE these ghosts. They remind me of the ones in The Nightmare Before Christmas that fly over during the Pumpkin Song.

The advantage of using a stack of books is that books can be carved out. So I carved out the bottom book just enough to fit in the smallest of vignette boxes. Now because no one was going to be opening this book, I could make the cuts sloppy and just hide the edge with paper. The zombie hand (that I had to buy as it came in the pack with the tombstones) made a perfect drawer pull. (Though I admit that at a distance, this zombie hand looks like it's giving me the finger!) The items in the drawer are all that remains of the Edgar Allan Poe idea. I thought, "if I went through a secret drawer in Poe's office, what might I find?" None of these items are glued down so they can be removed from the drawer and examined. I wonder what the skeleton key unlocks?

So what's the best part about this project? It lights up!

I hid a string of purple tiny lights around the perimeter of the graveyard. That was the point of the mummy cloth, really, to hide the lights. While the cloth didn't diffuse the lights as much as I would have liked, it looks way better in person that it does in these photos. I love how the ghosts practically disappear in the darkness.

 Let's talk about those lights for a minute. When I saw that these colored lights were available, I immediately bought 2 sets. I had not invested in the regular tiny lights because I thought they'd be hard to incorporate into vignette boxes...you'd have to drill a hole in the back to put the wire through...I'm not that handy. But knowing that there was no "back" to this project...no walls so to speak; it would be relatively easy to rig the string of lights. The battery pack sits in it's own little paper box that is attached to the top book as shown. I used a whole strand of lights and taped it down with some washi tape that was reinforced with collage medium. That held the wire down so that I could then cover them with the stained mummy cloth and glue the cloth down around the lights to also keep them in place. I think I now want to add lights to everything!

I have added this scene to my newly created "Halloween nook" in my craft space and it will stay up year round along with many of my other altered projects. 

Thanks for hanging with me to the end!

Stay safe out there! Wear your mask, wash your hands, social distance! Yes, it's important.

-Wy