As I’m sure we’ve mentioned, Halloween is our favourite time of year. We’ve yet to get on to our holiday baking yet but plans are made and ingredients will be bought soon enough.
It is our tradition to hold a Halloween party for all of our friends. We try (where possible) to go all out and make it a special occasion.. this starts with the invites. This year we tried to make something that was more of a keepsake… a party favour, more than a throwaway invite.
We actually came up with the idea back in July, but failed to actually make anything until the start of this month.. bad us!
We took jars from the dollar store and some of the grow-in-water cheap toys, snakes and body parts, with some plastic snakes for good measure. We cut the snakes down to a manageable size and each jar got some snake pieces, a body part and some plastic snakes.



We took some of the sanitiser mix Michael uses for homebrewing since it goes a little cloudy when it gets old, we added a touch of yellow and green food colouring and a pinch of cocoa powder to make it look really quite funky.

Several of the “things-in-jars” tutorials we found online covered the lids in twine to hide the modern lid, this seemed like a good idea so we did that and even tea-stained it a little to make it look less pristine.

We cheated and used adhesive labels, printed the specimen label with a laser printer and then tea stained the pages to make them old. They were hand cut out for the more aged look and stuck on the jars. We attacked them with sandpaper and chipped and peeled edges to wear them down and make them look battered and worn, some extra tea darkened the edges.


They then took several baths in hot gulf wax to really seal them in. I’m fairly sure even though the toys had been submerged for a week they hadn’t reached their full growth potential as I’m sure the one we have sitting on our shelf now has less room in it than it did!



Once they were completely dried and set we packaged them up in boxes stuffed with shredded paper. Wrapped in brown paper and finished with black ribbon for the full effect we spent an evening hand delivering them.



We obviously want our friends to know it has arrived and not leave it sat on the doorstep, but it is our mission to always deliver with no one noticing. So after we had pulled away from each house a text message was sent:
Our tracking services show that your package from Innsport has arrived. We request that you check your doorstep and confirm delivery.
(Innsport is a town in the Lovecraft mythos, since our specimen labels said Miskatonic University we figured it fit in).
We decided on the house to stop and take a photo on the doorstep.. yes they have a frosted glass door but we could be certain of reaching there in daylight and they had no windows looking over the approach to the house. This was also where I was caught out and discovered… notice the little face in the door? He certainly gave me a fright *grins* But I’ll claim my record still stands – no person has noticed me while I’m sneaking about their house, leaving packages on their doorstep!

If you are looking to get into the Halloween spirit head on over to our friends at Halloween Magazine and take a peek at the 2 part interview with our resident Mad Scientist Michael!