Here is how to make your own cast concrete tombstones. These are easy, inexpensive, impressive and tough Halloween props, ready to spook in 24 hours.
Tag Archives: holiday
Peggy-O-lantern
Lately we have been working on a new version of the PeggyDraw program, which is a program that lets you draw things that you want to display on the Peggy 2 for static images. The new version isn’t quite ready to show off this week, which is too bad because we like to put out our Peggies for halloween.
On the bright side, Mark Delp just sent in a program called bmp2peg that’s been added to the Peggy project at Google Code. It converts a (tiny) windows BMP file and generates an Arduino sketch that can run on the Peggy. (bmp2peg runs on windows, and also on linux if you recompile it, macs unknown thus far.) Both bmp2peg and the original cross-platform PeggyDraw can be used to put static images on the Peggy, or to generate static frames that you swap out in the code to build simple animations. The window-friendly pumpkin above was drawn as an image file, converted with bmp2peg, and installed on a Peggy 2 filled with orange LEDs.
Last year at halloween we took a different approach to the Peggy in the window. We took one filled with red LEDs, and every twenty seconds (or so) it would flash the letters “BOO” — huge and bright — and then go dark again. We took a little movie of this last year, showing how that works.
(The flickr video is embedded below — if you can’t see it, click through to see it.)
The video is very dark, but it’s accurate: our street really is that dark on Halloween. You have to walk slowly because you can’t see where the sidewalk is.
You can find more Halloween decor projects in our Halloween Project Archive.
Rovin Pumpkin
The Rovin’ Pumpkin’ is a simple robotic pumpkin, and a close cousin of the Snap-O-Lantern. Silently, it sits on your porch– camouflaged amongst the humble squashes.
After a minute, its green eyes start to glow, and it creeps… moving about one foot to the left… and stops. The eyes go dark again. It fades into the darkness. And it waits.
Time to get ready for Halloween
Improved Custom Message Hearts
In some ways, we really like candy message hearts. They make good ammo, you can stamp them with your own messages, they make halfway decent sidewalk chalk, and they do bizarre things if you cook them.
On the other hand, you may or may not like the way that these things taste. (To us, many years ago, they compared very favorably to the other varieties of sidewalk chalk that we had tried.) In either case there is certainly some room for culinary alternatives.
Read on and learn how to make your own highly edible custom cookie message hearts.
Vector Snowflake Application
A new application to draw your own snowflakes and save them in PDF format. Clean, cross-platform, open-source, and able to generate closed-polygon vector shape output. Oh yeah.
Neighborhood Holiday Parade
|
Edge-Lit Holiday Cards
Make your own edge-lit holiday cards using LEDs, plastic, paper, electrical tape, batteries, a pen, scissors, and a hobby knife.
Scariest Jack-o’-Lantern of 2008
Jack-o’-Lanterns are supposed to be scary, right? So here is our new one: it’s a mini pumpkin with a (tiny) scrolling LED stock ticker. Reprogrammable so you can update it every day with gloomy news from Wall Street.
Continue reading Scariest Jack-o’-Lantern of 2008
LED Ghosties for Halloween
You can make these simple LED ghosties (based on LED throwies) from a soda bottle, a couple of LEDs and batteries, string, and a scrap of fabric. Hang them in your trees, your haunted house, or in your porch for Halloween. They look especially excellent because the eyes seem to float in mid-air behind the fabric.
Continue reading LED Ghosties for Halloween
