Halloween Rattles

I saw an article about these rattles in a magazine of Halloween crafts a year or two ago.  These rattles looked like a fun project, so I thought I'd make a couple.  I no longer have the article, so I am not able to attribute the design to the original artist. The face designs are not mine, they are similar to the faces in the article.  I did make some changes to the magazine's way of making and decorating the rattle that I thought might be of some interest to my readers.

The magazine used a purchased paper mache ball with some beans added to make it rattle and a stick picked up from the yard.  The stick was glued to the paper mache ball and then the ball was painted.  A floppy ribbon was glued onto the stick.  This was a quick and easy craft project. 

Of course, I like to take things up a notch now and then so my project added a few levels of difficulty.  First off, I covered the purchased paper mache ball with a layer of paper clay to make the rattle stronger and more durable.  (Note to parents:  this adds a significant bonk factor to the rattle.  Make sure little ones don't hit each other over the head with these.)   The added layer of paper clay gave a larger area for gluing on the dowel, which makes the rattle less likely to come apart.  I used a dowel rather than a stick, because the smooth dowel has a better gluing surface than a stick. I painted the dowels prior to gluing them to the balls.  Still not a whole lot of difference, but it makes the project more likely to last.

Where I made the big change was in creating my own ribbon designs and in stiffening the ribbons.  I wanted to blog about this because I want people to understand that they are not limited to what the commercial market wants to put out as the year's designs.  When I could not find ribbon that interested me, I created my own ribbon designs.

First off, the ribbon is wired ribbon will hold its shape, but once the items are stored away for the year the ribbon gets crumpled and loses its crispness.  I wanted to avoid that because I make my projects to last for multiple years.  I used plain black and plain orange wired ribbon to begin the projects.  Once the ribbon was glued to the neck and tied to a pleasing shape, I painted the ribbon with multipurpose white PVA glue.  This glue is white going on, but dries clear.  I gave the ribbons two coats front and back. The glue makes the ribbon stiffer than it was with just the wired edge.  The ribbons have remained crisp and stiff for two years now without cracking or losing their shape.

For the pumpkin rattle, I used the little reinforcements that you put around notebook paper in a binder.  I painted them orange, then painted tiny yellow dots on them with a toothpick.  Once my reinforcements were painted I peeled them off their backing paper and stuck them onto the ribbon which already had the layers of dried glue.  Then I added another layer of the white PVA glue over the reinforcements.  The glue sealed in the dots.

The orange ribbon was also painted with two coats of the white PVA glue.  I wanted polka dots but was not able to find any in Halloween colors.  (That doesn't mean that this type of ribbon does not exist, it is just that my local craft shop did not have it.)  To make the polka dots, I painted some small adhesive dots black. (The type used for coding documents.) Then I stuck them to the ribbon and covered them with a layer of glue.  I ran into a problem at that point with the dots.  The orange ribbon was translucent enough that you could see the shadow of the dots through the back of the ribbon.  As problems go, it was not much of a problem really.  I could have just left it as it was.  Or, I could have painted more dots and added them to the back, however, trying to get the dots lined up exactly with their counterparts on the front would be challenging.  I decided to color the dots on the back with a permanent marker.  It worked well, and you would never know that the dots were not the same as the dots on the front.  One more coat of glue over the marker, and the project was finished. 

What I would like my readers to take away from this post is that they should think outside the box when it comes to adding embellishments.  Re-purposing household items to other uses can bring about unique embellishments to your art work. Even when the idea for the art work comes from inspiration from another artist, you can make this work of art your own with unique embellishments.  

Because of the weight of the paper clay, the rattles are a little top heavy, but they stand up nicely in a small flower vase.  The photo above shows the rattles standing in with some of my other Halloween decorations and some purchased ceramic pumpkins.

Note:  The painting behind the decorations is an original water color by Ron Prim.