![\"No](\"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/nocostumesign-204x300.jpg\")
A couple of Halloweens ago I was helping a friend hand out candy on her front porch, and we started kicking around the idea of having a series of buckets marked with different letter grades. Trick-or-treaters would be allowed to choose from the bucket we thought their costume rated; the “F” bucket would be reserved for teenagers with no costumes and would contain toothbrushes.<\/p>\n
However, I believe I like this idea even better. This gorgeous sign was designed by a haunter named Jeffrey Sherrard, and would be a splendid outdoor decoration.<\/p>\n
I unfortunately don’t have any additional information about the materials or construction of this particular sign; Shellhawk’s Nest<\/a>, where I found the image, points to The Garage of Evil<\/a>, but that site requires a cumbersome registration process for access. Poop.<\/p>\n A reasonably similar, albeit simpler, version might be DIY’d using a hardware-store sign bracket<\/a>, an oval (wood or foam, depending upon your skills), and the small wooden letters sometimes found at craft stores. Spray everything with metallic faux-finish paint and festoon with fake spider webs.<\/p>\n I quite like the Haunted Mansion-esque feel of this sign, but googling something like “diy halloween sign” will turn up plenty of other options: Birds and Soap<\/a>, lil blue boo<\/a>, Home Heart Craft<\/a>, and print with my pic<\/a> all have tutorials, and there are lots of others too.<\/p>\n Hang your sign, give full-size candy bars to kids who show up in homemade costumes (no matter how crappy, because they tried<\/em>), and threaten to hex anyone who dares to darken your doorstep in street clothes.<\/p>\n Update:<\/b> StoneMaven and Fiend4Halloween were both kind enough to share the details from the original post:<\/p>\n The texture on the oval insert & lettering is created by using sanded Dry-lok. I simply mix a small amount of clean, dry, construction sand into the Dry-lok and ‘pounce’ the paint on using an old brush to create a textured surface. I will do two or three light coats that way, allowing an hour or so of dry time in between. Then I lightly sand the top of the letters to return them to a slightly more flattened surface. That is followed by coats of flat black, brown, and bronze spray paints as base colors, a couple light coats of spray poly, and whatever decorative top coats are needed to finish the look. In this case it was just a light finger-dabbing of metallic bronze paint on the letters & scroll decorations. Also, there are 3 small neodymium magnets embedded into the back surface of the wood oval using a strong 2-part epoxy. This allows me to swap out the sign content very(!) quickly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, no real details about materials for the sign itself, but some good information about achieving the rusty-iron look. And the use of magnets to switch out signage is brilliant.<\/p>\n Thanks, guys!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A couple of Halloweens ago I was helping a friend hand out candy on her front porch, and we started kicking around the idea of having a series of buckets marked with different letter grades. Trick-or-treaters would be allowed to choose from the bucket we thought their costume rated; the “F” bucket would be reserved […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paint-it-black"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22799"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23150,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22799\/revisions\/23150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}