Halloween and other spooky things

Halloween is tomorrow.  Since Halloween is on a Thursday this year, many people held their Halloween Party on the Saturday before.  Some people will hold their parties on this coming Saturday.  We attended a party last weekend.  I went dressed in a witch costume.  My husband's costume is not as easily identifiable unless you play video games.  Gamers at the party instantly recognized his costume as Fallout Boy from the video game Fallout.  He said he was number 22.  I guess you will have to play the game to understand.

So, on to other spooky things.  I had so many interesting things to blog about that it was hard to know where to start.  After some consideration, I decided to pick one topic rather than give a quick over view of many topics.  That will leave topics for next year.  Not that I would have run out of things to blog about any time soon.  I'll start out today's topic with a question:  What do Mary Todd Lincoln, Harry Houdini, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have in common?  The answer, they all attended Seances.  And thereby hangs an interesting tale.  (Here comes that history geek again.)

The idea that people could communicate with spirits has been with us probably for as long as there have been people.  One of the earliest known books on the subject, Communication with the Other Side by George First Baron Littelton was published in England in 1760.  There were probably plenty of other texts, but they were no doubt circulated underground given the situation in Europe.  By 1760 belief in witchcraft was considered unfounded superstition, however, The Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition was not officially disbanded until 1834.  (That is true.  Look it up.)

One of the ways in which people tried to communicate with spirits was called a Seance.  This is derived from the French word for a sitting.  The term was used for a particular ceremony in which people sat in a circle around a table and attempted to contact spirits.  Mary Todd Lincoln was known to have held seances at the White House in an attempt to communicate with her deceased son.  (This is not even the weirdest story of occult happenings in the White House, but I'll save those stories for some other time.)  By the 1920s conducting seances was a booming business.  Some seances were used as a form of entertainment, however, the primary focus of most seances was still as a means of contacting a deceased friend or relative.

Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were friends at one time.  The issue of seances and communicating with the dead ended that friendship.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in Spiritualism, a religion that believes that spirits can communicate with the living.  He also believed that Harry Houdini had paranormal abilities and used them to perform his magic tricks.  Harry Houdini wanted to believe in communicating with spirits.  In his search to be able to find a medium to help contact his deceased mother, he realized that the rapping, knocking, ectoplasm, and table moving that were the staples of seances were magic tricks rather than spirits.  He began debunking the mediums and the idea of using a seance to contact spirits. He showed that there was nothing that the mediums were doing that could not be reproduced by a magic trick. He often attended seances incognito along with a sheriff.  When he found fraud, he had the medium arrested.  The debunking of mediums and the argument over the validity of Spiritualism is what ended their friendship.

To understand the belief in seances and the huge amount of fraud involved with seances in the early twentieth century, you have to look at it in the context of history.  World War I was fought between 1914 and 1918.  The Spanish Influenza Pandemic lasted between 1918 and 1920.  Millions of people died.  There were millions of grieving survivors trying to contact lost relatives or locate the bodies of the missing.  Desperate people were willing to pay large amounts of money for anything that might give them connection to those that had passed on.  This is why fraud was so rife during this time period.

Despite having debunked mediumship, Harry Houdini still wanted to believe in the ability to contact the dead.  He told his wife that if it were possible to come back, that he would come back to her through a seance.  She kept a candle burning continuously by his picture and held a seance every year on Halloween, which in Celtic mythology was the time when the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest.  They had a secret code word, that was to be produced as proof that it was really Harry.  The code word was produced at a seance three years after his death, but his wife said that the circumstances were faked.  She held a seance every year for ten years.  When she had not been contacted by that time, she put out the candle and quit holding the seances. 

Most people think that is the end of the story.  It isn't.   There are many seances held for Harry Houdini every year.  There is even one that is called the Official Houdini Seance that is held by the Chicago Society of Magicians.  So far,  no one has been able to prove contact.

Despite Houdini's debunking of mediums, there is still a belief that spirits can be sensed or that they can contact the living.  The debate over whether this is reality or imagination continues.  Many people have had experiences that cannot be proven, but leave them with no doubt that they have sensed or been contacted by spirits.






 

Shaman Staff Walking Stick-Part 12

I'm finally getting back to working on the walking stick.  Between traveling, visits with friends and family, and getting ready for a Halloween party.  I feel as if I have been away from this project for a year.  I have added a lot more images to the stick.  Monday I will be outside wood burning again.  It feels great to be back at work on the walking stick.  I get a bit irritable when I am away from my projects for too long. 

When I last blogged on the walking stick I had added the images of a turtle and a whale.  Since then, I have added the image of a harpoon, in keeping with my original plan that the stick would also show how images of how to catch or hunt the animals.  (See earlier posts on the walking stick for an explanation of my intentions for this stick.)  I have added images of a salamander, frog, snake, beetle, bee, bird, and a deer.  The images are sized to fit the space, and are not in proportion to each other.  The intention is to show each creature, not to be an explanation of the size of the animal.  What I have on the stick should keep me busy wood burning for a couple of days.  The transferred images are a little hard to see in pictures, but I wanted to get a couple of pictures up for today's blog.


Once I had all the pictures transferred to the walking stick, I realized that the all of the creatures were going in the same direction except for one.  The turtle was going the other way.  I decided to erase the turtle and change it to going in the same direction as everything else.  The point of the harpoon is also opposite, but it is pointing at the whale so at least that makes some sense. I suppose that all in all it did not make any difference which direction the turtle was facing, but it just seemed like a noticeable anomaly.  That is the good thing about my method of transferring images onto the stick.  They won't smear off, but can easily be erased off.  If there is any residue after the erasure, I can go back and lightly sand the area and that will be the end of it.

Now I am in a race against time.  Cooler weather is starting to set in.  The mornings are chilly, so I am shifting my outside work time from first thing in the morning to mid-morning or early afternoon.  Fortunately, it has been staying warmer later into the year, but it has also been know to snow here as early as November.  When I finish wood burning all the images I have on the stick now, I will still have about one third of the stick left to embellish.  I have not finished adding the mammals.  Once they are done, I will be adding human figures. 

Well, that is about it for now.  Wednesday's blog post will be on Halloween.  Next Sunday's post will show the progress on the walking stick.

Decorative Mask for Halloween and a Witch Story

Decorative Halloween Mask

Obviously my Halloween projects for this year were decorative masks.  Some years I get really inspired and do something major, such as the Faux Tesla Coil Diorama project from last year.  Other years I am so busy with other projects that I need to do something less labor intensive.  This year my project was to create some decorative masks.  (I'll leave wearable masks for a future project.)

On last Wednesday's blog post, I described the basics of making a lift mask.  Today's mask is a lift mask of the the mask I showed on last Wednesday's blog.  When I created the first lift mask, I was of two minds about how to decorate it.  I kept going back and forth.  Did I want to make a it into a witch or a devil.  Finally I thought, "Why not both?"  So I used the as yet undecorated mask I had made to make a second lift mask. 

Basically it was the same procedure I used for the other mask.  I  covered the mask with plastic wrap to protect it from the moisture in the papier mache.  Then I added a layer of aluminum foil.  The foil was slipping around so I used tape in strategic spots to hold everything in place.  Learn from my error on this.  I had used masking tape.  By the time the project was finished the masking tape had bonded so tightly that I could hardly get the masks apart.  It would have been much better to use a low tack blue painters tape for that.  Anyway, I added a layer of masking tape over the foil and then added layers of papier mache.  Once the papier mache was dry, I removed the mask from the other mask and added a layer of masking tape and layers of papier mache to the back.  Then it was ready to decorate.  The face is painted with acrylic paints.  The hair is braided and painted rafia applied to the mask with hot glue.

Sometimes when I am working on a project, I imagine a back story for the project.  The back story can give me some idea of how the piece should be decorated, and it helps pass the time when I'm doing something repetitive.  I was thinking that the story would be a basic Halloween story:  boiling cauldrons, eye of newt, etc.  Or maybe a sea witch, with dripping kelp for hair.  But the story that came up was something different.  It told me of women exhausted and bewildered.  Women who started out on an ordinary day only to find themselves incarcerated and accused of Witchcraft before evening.  I began thinking about the Salem Witch Trials.

Many have heard of the theory that the Salem Witch Trials being caused by ergot poisoning.  That is not the only theory out there.  This theory carries much more weight.  In her book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman:  Witchcraft in Colonial America , Carol F. Karlson put forth a new theory using statistical analysis.  Once it was looked at in this light, some information became glaringly obvious.  The majority of women accused of witchcraft were widows or single women who had inherited and were managing property or a business.  In some cases there was documentation that there were property disputes with neighbors.  Plenty of people at the time thought that it was scandalous that a woman was running a business.  If the woman was somehow put out of the way, well, someone else would have to take over the business.  A few coins dropped in a girl's pocket to shout Witchcraft! is a much more reasonable scenario.  The charge of Witchcraft was very hard to disprove because there was no evidence other than someone saying so.  A young girl would not necessarily have the cognitive ability to understand just how much damage she was doing.  Once things got started, crowd psychology took over.  Fear of the world of the unseen was a major part of the religious doctrine of the time.  Cotton Mather wrote about it extensively.  And who knows, maybe even a little of that alleged ergot poisoning added fuel to the fire.

One other event strongly points to the start up of the witchcraft accusations being a deliberate act.  The  Charter for the colony lapsed.  There was a period of time that there was no valid document in effect.  With no documentation stating that the colony had to follow English Law, things happened.  The Salem Witch Trials were held during the period that no charter was in effect.  When the Charter was reinstated, the remaining prisoners were released.  Imagine that.

The governor of the colony during that time was Governor Spotswood.  Guess where the governor went after he left the Massachusetts colony?  He came to Virginia.  Guess what happened next?  Women were accused of Witchcraft.  They had a Witch Ducking.  Witch ducking happened in one of two ways.  A woman was strapped into a chair held by a long arm on a swivel.  The chair was swung out into the river and submerged.  The second way was to tie the suspected witch's right thumb to the left toe.  A rope was tied around the waist so that the witch could not escape.  Then the person was thrown into the river.  In either case, the outcome was the same.  If the person was able to float to the surface, she was said to have "rejected the baptismal waters" which meant she was a witch and subject to imprisonment and most likely further torture.  If the woman drowned it meant she was innocent.   That is kind of a no win situation for the accused. 

Witch Ducking was not just used in cases of suspected witchcraft.  It was also used as a punishment for women who were considered "scolds."  These were women that displayed anger,  expressed their opinion, had quarrels with others, or in some cases were considered a public nuisance.  This could be a woman that was inebriated, elderly, had dementia, or had in some way become a ward of the public.  Men could be ducked as well, but mainly only if they were charged with witchcraft. 

Grace Sherwood was the last known person convicted of Witchcraft in Virginia.  She was known as the Witch of Pungo, because she lived in Pungo, Princess Anne County.  She was ducked at a place known as Witch Duck Point.  Her charge was that she bewitched a woman causing her to miscarry.  She had also been accused of bewitching a bull causing its death, and bewitching hogs and cotton fields.  The miscarriage charge was the only one that stuck.  (Maybe not  so far fetched.  She was a midwife.  Midwives of the time would have know about concoctions that could cause a miscarriage  No proof that she did this, but it is a possibility  However, I'd like better proof than a trial by ducking to determine guilt or innocence.)  After her trial by ducking, she spent eight years in prison. 

I grew up in Princess Anne County where Witch Duck Point is located. (Later annexed to become part of Virginia Beach)  At the time, the area was basically woodland.  We used to tell all sorts of ghost tales about it.  Then the area started to become built up.  Developers started to say that no one had ever been ducked there.  I guess it was bad for business to try to sell real estate where torture had taken place.  Anyway in 2006, Governor Tim Kaine recognizing that her conviction was a "miscarriage of justice."  A statue of Grace Sherwood is displayed near Sentara Bayside Hospital.

A note to readers:  On my next Sunday blog post I will be posting on the Shaman Staff walking stick project.  Next Wednesday's post will be on some other interesting phenomena related to witches, magicians, and wizards to end up this years Halloween series of posts. 


   

Cabin Trip and Festival

Color in the forest.

I've been away at the cabin for a few days, so I haven't done any work on the walking stick this week.  I thought my readers would enjoy some of the pictures from this trip. 

Stone steps leading to the stream.

We had a lot of foggy days and rain while we were up there.  Fortunately the rain held off and it was only overcast to a light mist during the Wine and Garlic Festival held at Rebec Vineyards.  My husband and I have been to this festival for a number of years and we really enjoy it.  The temperature is moderate this time of year and it makes the festival going experience much more enjoyable than the blazing heat of summer.  As its name implies, there are wine tastings and garlic flavored foods.  And there is fresh garlic to sample as well.  I had no idea there were so many different types of garlic.  The motto of the festival is "It's Chic to Reek."  And if you sample all the garlic, you will.  If you go to this festival, plan on eating at least one sample of garlic, or you will be overwhelmed by everyone else.  I love garlic, so this festival is a treat.  The music at this festival is also great.  For the non-garlic lovers there are festivals at other vineyards coming up.  The whole area has been a hot bed of concerts, wine festivals, craft beer festivals, and local fairs since September.  If you can't make one of the festivals this year, start planning for next year. 

Wild apple tree.

Although it is a little early, we were up to do a winter shut down on the cabin.  We have to drain the water from the pipes so the pipes don't freeze during the winter.  We plan to be up at the cabin some more this fall, but it gives us peace of mind not to have to worry about dropping everything to have to run up to the cabin unexpectedly because of an early cold snap.  We have done so much work on this place, that we don't want to have to replace burst pipes.  Every time we go up until spring, we will have to shut the cabin down for winter again, but at least we won't have to spend time replacing water pipes.  

My husband working in the knee wall in the attic.

 

My husband was doing work inside during this trip.  It was a comfortable temperature to be working in the attic.  I mostly worked outside this trip, getting rid of brush.  And of course we had to get up leaves.  Some trees dropped their leaves early this year.  Other leaves are just coming into their high color.  I had hoped to get some good pictures of the autumn color, but most days were gray and misty so the colors were not as bright.

Night time photo of the moon over the mountain.

There has been a lot of rain this year.  The stream and the river are running quite high compared to the years of drought that came across the region.  You can see the benefit of the rain in the number of apples on the trees.  There are many wild apple trees up there.  The story has it that Johnny Appleseed came through this area.  These trees may be descendents of those apple seeds planted so long ago.  

We picked apples while we were there.  Wild apples look different from the apples you see in the grocery store.  They are smaller and have lots of dark spots on them.  The spots are molds that attack the apples.  Since the apples aren't sprayed, they have a lot of spots.  That is okay.  The apples are still good to eat.  I use them for cooking apples.  I baked an apple crisp while we were there. 

My parents had friends at the bottom of the mountain who had an apple orchard.  My father and his friends were allowed to pick the apples that had fallen from the trees.  These apples were called windfall apples.  They were not good for sale because the apples bruise when they hit the ground.  However, the apples were still good to eat, and my father would pick bushels of them and bring them to the cabin to make apple cider.  The cider press is now old and in sorry shape.  My husband has plans to refurbish it in the future.  Add it to the list of things that need doing up there.  (At the festival, one vendor was selling hand painted signs.  One sign said, "Camp Workyourassoff."  I fully understand this sign.  Having a cabin, or any type of vacation home for that matter, is a labor of love.  It is a lot of work, but you do it because you love the place and the good times you have there.)

There was a beautiful full moon while we were up there.  Even with the clouds and mist, you could still see the silhouette of the mountains and trees in the moonlight.  I took some pictures, but they were pretty much unusable until I started working with photo enhancing on the computer.  I'm posting one, but I don't know how well they will show up on the blog.  Maybe the Google photo enhancements can sharpen them up a bit.  

A note to readers.  The location is listed as Mechanicsville, Virginia, which is where I live.  These photos were taken in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Decorative Mask for Halloween-Photos

Lift mask.

I'm posting some of pictures of my Halloween work on Wednesdays through the end of October.
This type of mask is called a lift mask.  A lift mask is a mask that uses another mask as the base for the mold.  In this case, the mask was a three quarter size full face mask that was used as a wall decoration.  The face on the original mask was a normal looking face.  I added exaggerated features by building up the nose and chin, changing the shape of the mouth, and enlarging the eye area to create a mask that looked completely different from the original.  The mask underneath only serves as a solid base on which to build a new mask.

Original mask.

The original mask, purchased at a thrift store, was covered with plastic wrap to protect it from moisture from the papier mache.  Next I covered the plastic wrap with aluminum foil. The foil was covered completely with masking tape.  All of this was followed by a layer of papier mache on top of the foil.  Once that layer was dry, the mask was removed from the base and a layer of papier mache was added onto the foil on the underside.

Once the papier mache layer on the underside of the foil was dry, I began to add bits of foil and tape to build up the features.  I think I put four layers of papier mache on each side of the mask to make sure that it was sturdy enough to hang as a decoration.  Then it was painted.  I use acrylic paints.  They give it a very different look from the poster paint or tempra paint that is usually used on papier mache.
 

Shaman Staff Walking Stick-Part 11-Photos

It has been raining this week.  The remnants of Tropical Storm Karen came through earlier in the week, but all we  had from it was rain.  After that, the storm reformed off the coast as a low pressure system.  It started raining again and has been raining on and off all week.  I haven't been able to get outside to do any wood burning so far this week.

I have added some more aquatic creatures to the walking stick so that I'm ready to get started once it is dry enough to work outside.  I do my wood burning outside so that the odor of charred wood does not smell up the house.  Even though I am working outside, on damp days I can still smell a bit of the charred wood odor coming off the stick.  The scent is not strong enough to be unpleasant, it is just there.

The pictures are not as well lit as I would like them to be.  I accidentally knocked over one of my lamps and broke the bulb.  I'm hoping I can find the bulb I need locally.  If not I'll have to order it.  Another thing to add to my list of things that need doing.

Anyway, it has been a rainy week so I have been working on other projects.  I'm even getting some house work done.  Cooler weather is setting in, and it is time to change out summer clothing for warmer items.  I might as well get that done now while it is too wet to be working outside.

Madam Ludmilla Halloween Art Doll- Photos

I'm posting some pictures of some of my Halloween work on Wednesdays through October. 

This is a doll I made in few years ago.  The is held upright by a doll stand.  She was the second to last doll I made before building free-standing dolls.  She is nine and a half inches tall.  Her body has a wire armature covered by batting strips wrapped with cotton thread, and has an outer skin of muslin.  The head and hands are baked clay.  The hair is wool doll's hair.  She is painted with acrylic paints.

I wanted to make a doll that portrayed the era when seances were all the rage.  I wanted to portray her at the moment that she unveils the crystal ball.  I guess that this is also the doll that started me thinking about dioramas, even though I did not start working with them for a few years down the road.  Without the context of a spooky set-up for a seance, the doll does not really express everything that I wanted to show about a the era.  

 With this doll, I was experimenting with bake-in-the-oven clays to sculpt the head and hands.  I have only made a few dolls by this method.  I don't have much sculpting experience, so trying to sculpt detail in such small parts was difficult.  Also I learned that on such tiny parts, the clay can burn easily. 

I guess I am still experimenting with glues.  This is the third time I've tried a glue that was supposed to glue glass to metal.  The crystal ball fell off just before I took the photo.  In theory, it is supposed to be clear once it is dry.

Shaman Staff Walking Stick-Part 10-Photos

I've done a little more wood burning on the walking stick since I blogged about it last Sunday.  This project is moving along quickly, but I never seem to have as much time to work on it as I'd like. 
  
(Sorry the formatting is giving me a problem while trying top get the pictures on here.  More of the blog post is below.)

Regular readers know that I am working on an art stick called Shaman Staff.  This walking stick is an art piece based on the idea that folk tales and anthropological literature represent many early cultures as having a shaman, wizard, or magician. This magical person generally carried a staff or wand that had strange markings on it.  The idea for this walking stick was to show what that staff was and what the markings might mean.  Read back through my earlier blog posts to get the full story on that and on the creation story that is burned into the stick.

So far on the walking stick I have dealt with the beginning of the universe and have moved the story into local time and space.  The images being burned into the walking stick now begin to deal with taking form.  The images are now going to be of things found in our world.  I'm starting with creatures that lived in the water as the theory is that life started in water and moved on from land.  So my first images in this section are fish, and that is as far as I have gotten with the wood burning.  From there it will move to insects, animals, and people.  As I blogged in previous posts, my theory on what information a shaman might have on the staff might pertain to information on what foods to eat and information on how and where to obtain it.  The wavy lines, a symbol for water, might have been information on how to get to the river, or where good fishing spots might be found.

(More of the blog post is below.  For whatever reason the blog platform will not let me move the text up below the previous paragraph.  Some days it works fine.  Other days you can't get things to work.  It has taken me a number of tries to get the pictures in the order I want them.  It kept changing the order.  I finally had to give up and say this is the best that I could get it to work today.)

The decorations on the staff might have been a mnemonic device to help people recall information in a preliterate era.  My theory was that in small populations, that much information could be lost if an event suddenly ended the lives of the people who had that information.  By having the information burned into the stick, the information was still available in some form, even if the person who had the information was no longer available.  For example, the pictures of the fishing net and fishing hook on the staff, not only gives information on how to catch a fish, but how to make a net or the best shape of a fish hook.  As a mnemonic device, each picture is not just a picture, but it also has information attached to it.  Perhaps when sitting around the fire at night the shaman went down the stick and told the stories/information that was attached to the stick.  Repetition of stories is a powerful way to transmit information.  Perhaps each picture carries more than one bit of information.  For example:  the first picture on the stick might be the beginning of the creation story, but also contain information on the history of the people by also containing a second story such as John wed Jane and their son was Jack.  The next picture might also contain the history that Jack wed Jill and their daughter was Sue.  Anyway, you can begin to see how much information that the staff might actually contain.  By constantly repeating the information on the staff, it would be easy to keep the details of oral history in order.  That is my theory, and I'm sticking to it.

 


I make my sketches for these images on graph paper in order to make sure that they will fit into the space I
have for them on the stick.  Then I transfer the image to the stick by the method discussed in earlier blog posts.  I haven't finished the sketches for all the creatures yet.  Some sketches I've completed have not yet been transferred to the stick.  I'll get more done on that this week.

I had something interesting happen this week regarding the walking stick.  I received a notification from Google.  Some of Google's photo enhancing techniques can capture images and turn them into an animation.  Somehow their computer program had been able to interpret the images of the phases of the moon on the walking stick as a progression.  They turned the pictures into an animation.  The stick turns and you see the phases of the moon change.  I may take the time to try to figure out how to post it on the blog at some point.  It was amazing that they could take the disjointed images from the blog and turn them into a seamless animation.  (By the way, if you have pictures on Google, this program is on by default.  You have to turn it off if you don't want it.  Seriously, you should read what this program can do.)  But other than the fact that some computer program was sifting through my images and turning them into pictures that I did not create in that form (creepy), it was kind of interesting what can be done with the program. 

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I will be posting pictures of some of my Halloween work on the Wednesday blog posts through October.  The next post on the walking stick will be next Sunday.

Corn doll-Photos

Due to some last minute changes in my plans, I did not get any work done on the walking stick since I blogged on Sunday.  I'll be working on the next set of drawings to go onto the stick today. 

I normally start decorating for Halloween on October 1st.  That did not get started either.  I usually like to get it out all at once, but it looks like I will be working on it a little at a time this week.  I documented most of my collection of handmade Halloween decorations last year.  There are a few things that I did not photograph.  I'll be adding pictures of them as I go along this year. 

The photo is of an old corn doll that lives in my kitchen.  She stands atop an antique plate rack with some antique plates.  I made her in 1993.  Over the years she has faded to a brown color, but she still seems to have a lot of energy.

A note to regular readers:  I will be blogging about the walking stick on Sundays and will be posting pictures of Halloween decorations on Wednesdays throughout October.