Step 2: The Decorations

Before I tackle the main focus of my display, I'll share some of the details I added throughout the space.

I had one bag of cobwebs that I used touches of all over the place and didn't even use half of the bag.  It was tricky to get the hang of working with it to get the right thickness and stretch, but it was worth the effort to add that spooky aged feel to our lab.  I stretched some over the windows and added bloody hand print window clings to the main window.

I found a great craft idea  in the Halloween edition of Woman's Day,  It inspired these two specimens framed in shadow boxes:

Here's the how-to for the finger specimen:
I bought a bag of plastic severed fingers, and then ran around finding anything I had that might make it look more realistic.  This is the result of adding concealer to the finger, dark eye shadows to the nail, and accenting the creases in the knuckles with brown marker, and then smudging with green paste food coloring.

I stuck two t-pins through the plastic finger at angles that would look realistic when framed. Then the most time consuming step came next: adding blood to the finger. I used a fake-blood recipe that suggested water & corn syrup, colored with red food coloring and a drop of blue, thickened with flour and darkened with cocoa powder.  In hind sight, I would have omitted the water to quicken the drying time.  With repeated coats of the  blood, I eventually got some to stick to the plastic finger:

Thick fake blood mixture

Applying multiple layers of blood

I positioned the finger on a piece of black felt, and then used hot glue to hold it in place.  Underneath I used a glue stick to attach a piece of card stock with the label that reads "Digitum alfreedum, 1778.  He has made an erroneous point"

The piece of felt was laid over the back board of a shadow box.  It was easily framed this way, and the shadow box can be re-used.

The set of vampire teeth were blackened, bloodied, pinned, glued, labeled, and framed much the same way. 

The same blood mixture was smeared and splattered on several white sheets and rolls of gauze.  The white sheets were draped over chairs and tables, and the gauze was strewn about on the coffee table and side tables.

 

 Tip:  The corn syrup blood mixture is very sticky until completely dry.  Besides using the shower curtain as a drying space, I also split the sides of garbage bags and slid them over folding chairs to drape the wet sheets for drying.  Our kitchen floor was very sticky, even after being mopped upwards of 5 times!  I would suggest covering your work surface with plastic (paper sticks to the blood and doesn't come off without ripping when the blood is dried).  Besides the stick-factor, I was pleasantly surprised to find that even after adding a full container of liquid red food color in the blood mixture, it did not stain our linoleum floor tiles.

Step 1: The Invitations

While I was collecting lots of ideas for my overall decor, I realized that one of my first priorities would need to be invitations.  Originally I was going to go with a straight forward paper version worded in scientific lingo.  Something along these lines: /http://www.livinglocurto.com/2009/01/mad-scientist-party-part-1/

But, as my decor developed a decidedly more grotesque feel, I wanted the invitations to be equally repulsive (that's one of the great things about Halloween after all - gross is good!).  I set out to make Martha Stewart's finger-in-a-box invitations: http://www.marthastewart.com/275460/handmade-halloween-invitations-and-cards#/280258, but shopping for the ingredients revealed that they would be both expensive and time consuming.

In the end, I took another of Martha's ideas and adapted it to make it a bit more gory for my science lab feel.  I started with this premise: http://www.marthastewart.com/275460/handmade-halloween-invitations-and-cards#/268126 and ended up with these eyeball specimens with party invitation on the back: 

 

These invitations were fairly simple and cheep to construct, and gave the authentic 'insane lab' feel that I was going for.  (I must admit that the bio hazard bags were a great part of the effect, and were courtesy of a connection to a local hospital.  However, the rest of the supplies are readily available and reproducible.)

Materials:

• Gooey eyeballs 
• Clear containers 
• Fake Blood (recipe below)
• Fake Maggots
• Party info printed on cardstock
• Bio Hazard or other clear plastic bags

 I bought these at Michael's.

Test tubes, while very scientific, were not quite large enough & mushed the eyeballs.  I found a few test tube shaped containers of bath confetti that were large enough to hold 4 eyeballs and were on clearance for 10 cents each! (Shown inside the bag in the photo above).  I needed more though, so I supplemented with a package of small screw top jars meant for storing jewelery.

 

There are many fake blood recipes out there.  I wanted very thick blood for this so it wouldn't leak, so I used straight corn syrup and food coloring.  This shade is many drops of red color, with about a half a drop of blue. 

The maggots were an awesome final touch.  I bought this string of bait on clearance at our local Kmart.  I pulled them apart and scattered a few over each set of bloody eyeballs.

These jars are ready for the bio-hazard bags.

 For the party information, I looked up the wording for scientific experiments, and then tweaked it to fit my party info.  I named our lab (Tiff + Eric = TerIFFic), created an easy logo, and then used Consolas font which reminds me of type writter font. Here's the result:

Rather than worry about shipping, we hand delivered our invitations.  It was amusing to hand them out 'hazard' side up, and watch them take in the tube of eyeballs in all their gory-glory, and then turn it over to discover that it was a party invite!  Our friends' had priceless expressions & piqued curiosities!

Stay tuned for decor, lighting, food & drinks~

Where it all began

My boyfriend had no idea what he was in for.

One day in early September I was browsing an Oriental Trading magazine and decided that a Halloween party would be fun.  As an only child with a creative mother, I had experienced many elaborate themed birthday parties in my life (think live clue game, an indoor carnival, and super sloppy double dare), and this would be the first themed party I would host myself.

I noticed that the items in OT fell into a few popular groups; witches, vampires, and mad scientists.  When I described my vision for these three possibilities, my boyfriend was in favor of the mad scientist's laboratory.  I took that decision and ran with it.  Details were continually added and refined over the weeks that followed, and now that the party is a happy memory, several people having been asking for pictures and details on how it was done. This blog is the result of those requests, and my desire to share what I've learned with others.

Almost a full 2 months before Halloween I was searching for images of laboratories, mad scientist costumes, and evil experiments to get my mind wrapped around the general feel of the party.  While I don't care for the effect of those plastic scenes you can put over your walls, I did find them to be a good starting point for the details of a mad scientist lab.  

These are the sites that got me started:
Oriental Trading's Mad Scientist Room
Suggestions to build your own mad scientist lab