Won’t you take me to Spookytown?

Every summer, I go through my art supplies and pull out the items I haven’t used in quite a while. Things that take up space in my small storage area. I either donate these items to someone who will use them or make one big project out of them to use them up. This year, I had some extra sculpey from a project a couple of years ago and a lot of extra cardboard boxes and foam packaging from various shipments.

I decided to make a cave tunnel for a train and a couple of mountaintops for my Lemax Spookytown village. This was the project I worked on whilst soaking in the competition during the Olympics. A perfect segue to Spooky Season. Took me two and a half weeks to build, and boy was it a blast.

After getting a couple of second degree burns from my hot glue gun during the mountain construction, I made a mixture of two parts water and one part flour to use for paper mache. I used the sculpey to erect a staircase and well for a waterfall. Side note – it was unintentional that the planned waterfall was in front of my photo of Mesa Falls in Idaho. Happy coincidence, I guess.

The painting process began, and I realized that I would need some real looking plant life so I ordered some dried moss from Amazon and finished the painting process while I waited for the delivery.

The moss brought it all together and I tested the train one last time to make sure the tunnel would still work after all the paper mache molding I did with the tunnel. When that was good, it was time to add the buildings which is exactly what it did whilst Team USA men won their volleyball bronze medal. as you can see, I use a green piece of cheesecloth as protection for my glass top table. The train tracks have sharp edges on bottom.

I had two new additions to my town this year. The first was a collection of tombstones to make a cemetery halfway up one of the mountains.

The other was the Fright Night Cinema building, a Michaels exclusive this year. My favorite building now, and it pairs well with the popcorn machine I picked up last year.

If you’re just finding out about Lemax, they also make Christmas villages. You can purchase their items from certified sellers at Michaels and Ace Hardware Stores, or at Gift Spice and the Eerie Emporium websites. You can get retired buildings on EBay or Amazon but, as always, buy at your own risk at those sites.

Happy Summerween, Witches.