"Abandoning" the Little Bayou House!

Recycling or reusing just keeps getting better and better.  With the upcoming "Ultimate Clue Hunt" a little less than a month away, it is getting down to crunch time.  Although we have most of the larger props made, there are still a few details that need to be remedied.  One such thing it the decorating of the Little Bayou House.  Since this is to be held early in October, I decided to forego the usual Fall/Halloween decorations and just let the clue hunt decor suffice.  The back-story that I wrote deals with a good bit of the Coastal lore set back in the late 1800s.  Now..fast-forward to present day. The solvers of the quest will be trying to unravel a mystery set long ago.  The house was locked up tight and left just as it was.  Over the years, it has fallen in disrepair and has acquired that "abandoned house" appearance.  Imagine that!  A house that no one has entered for over a hundred years that looks abandoned!  So I have my work cut out for me.  I have to fully abandon the Little Bayou House but still live here.  Hmmm?  This should be interesting.  Also, their quest must be tackled without any "modern day" conveniences..no lights (other than a few back lights or lanterns) , electronics or even running water.

This afternoon after finishing my chores, I set to work creating a large flower arrangement that has died. Yep, flowers do not stay fresh and pretty for long without water!  Not wanting to use the normal route and go buy silk flowers for this decoration, I opted to recycle.  I figured that most of the petals would have dry-rotted by this time anyway so I thought a lovely bouquet of sticks might be nice!  I wanted something that would cast lots of weird shadows on the wall behind the bouquet.  This was to go behind a bed that sits catty-cornered in what used to be my daughter's bedroom.  It is now the main character's bedroom.  I pondered the situation and came up with the idea of using some old artificial berry stalks that at one time were Christmas decorations.  They had definitely see better days!  The stalks were peeling their outer paper and the berries (Styrofoam) were squished and most were missing.  I had already tossed these on the discard pile!  They were most perfect!  I toted them outside to do a major overhaul on them!  With a little black paint daubed here and there, the berries began to look quite old..and dead!  Oh..and it is really hard to paint something so springy so I opted for the old "hit and miss" technique!  Having no (eco-harsh) spray paint on hand, the brush had to do.  This did knock off a bunch more berries but I merely wired them back in place as best I could.  The cruddier and more battered they became, the more I liked them!

It was while I was painting berry vines, that I smugly thought of how I was helping "save" the world by recycling these things once again.  I bought them seventeen years ago and used them for most everything!  Now, new life...errr...death(?)..was being breathed back into them!  I was eager to see how my arrangement looked.  Then I noticed something a tad strange.  My berry vines had words!  Yep, it seems that way back years ago, recycling was in vogue!  Whatever company made the decorations had recycled newspapers as the filler for the vines!  Wow!  I wish I could read some of those papers!  It was obvious that the newspapers had been put through a shredder then the strips were wrapped around wire.  Finally an outer layer of tissue paper gave the nice brown color!  My berry vines were now recycled for the third time!  Aww, I felt really good about hanging on to the berry vines for all of these years.  Painted black, these decorations have another few years of worth in them as Halloween decorations.  And to think...I have a nice, dead arrangement for just a few pennies worth of paint!

For the arrangement, I added some dried grasses and two stalks of (some sort of) plant that came in a floral arrangement that Mark got me for our anniversary back in March.  I dried them and now those, too, are recycled!  With a little back-lighting, shadows were cast on the wall with satisfaction!  Pretty creepy!  The arrangement looks sufficiently...umm..old!