Halloween Decor for the Office

Here's an image-heavy tutorial on how to build a Scary Hand Wall Sconce. It's a kind of goofy crafty homage to Jean Cocteau. (Well, sort of.)
You'll need:
Halloween-oriented glove
battery-operated candle
20 pipe cleaners
hot glue gun and glue
4 3" heavy cardboard circles (or heavy cardboard and a waterglass and an exacto knife)
Cotton or Poly batting
needle and thread


First get about 20 pipe cleaners to create the bony structure of a hand. Use three pipe cleaners per finger, three pipe cleaners to create the outline of a palm and a few more pipe cleaners to weave in and out of the palm to give it strength.















Then stuff the fingertips of your scary bony glove with cotton or poly batting and wrap some of the batting around the pipe cleaner fingers as you insert them into the fingers of the glove.














Sew the fingertips of the glove together, overlapping the thumb on top of the other fingers to create a fist which can hold a candle.











Cut out 4 circles of cardboard or two circles of foamcore. These don't have to be circular - they can be oval, which would probably be better - but I didn't have an oval template handy so I used a waterglass as a template. Make them about 3" in diameter (75mm ish).









Cut out a rectangular section in the centers of three of the circles.













Place the three of the cardboard circles inside the stuffed glove. Thread the pipe cleaners from the bottom of the palm frame in through the rectangular cutout in the circles. Hot glue to secure the pipe cleaners to the cardboard.
















Sew the edges of the glove at the wrist together around the cardboard circles or hot glue them down to the cardboard.
















Hot glue the fourth cardboard circle on top of the glove and other cardboard circles.
















You can now attach the scary hand sconce to the wall. I would use that removeable sticky tape stuff that either Scotch Brand or 3M puts out (I can't remember which) so that you don't permanently damage the wall. And instead of putting a candle in the fist, think about using one of those cheap-o kid's Halloween flashlights; just point it back towards the wall.



















Here's another something or other to attach to the wall: a small plastic skull with a fake candle hotglued on top. When I was a kid, my stepbrother - a budding paleontologist - found an old skull in the woods. He dripped different colored wax all over the top of the skull and used it as a candleholder. I never went into his room because he kept the skull by his bedside and it scared the bejesus out of me to have that hollow-eyed thing staring at me.(As an adult I keep wondering who would let a teenage boy keep a real human skull in his bedroom? Perhaps it wasn't real, but to a six year old, it was creepy!)

There was a sale at JoAnn's Fabrics yesterday and I found the remnants of a bolt (approx. 3 meters left!) of red skull black lace (for $3.00 a yard! Yeah, baby!) which I'm going to use as a valance over one of the windows in the hall outside my office...