Family Portraits!

  October has to be my favorite month!  With it, not only do we have the Annual Clue Hunt on the Bayou, but it is the month of fall and Halloween!  It is a time that I can decorate to my heart's content with no worries of anyone thinking I am slap crazy.  Well, a lot of folks think that anyway but at least during October, I have an excuse.  This year is especially happy for me since I can decorate for Halloween AND the clue hunt.  With most of the clue hunt being in outbuildings, the house is mine for Halloween decorations!  

  One of my most missed decorations for the season is the "Family Portraits".  Several years ago, I did Halloween on a budget.  I wanted to see if there was a way to fully dress the house with minimum cost. There was.  For a mere $10, I managed to outfit the entire house.  I pulled a lot of Christmas lights, strange knickknacks from the cabinets and used my computer and printer to no end.  My favorite of these was the "Family".  I did a search for vintage movie monsters and came up with a jackpot of goodies!  These were printed in black ink and framed with an assortment of old frames (some with no glass).  The frames had seen better days so a quick splash of black paint covered a multitude of sins. 

 That first year, I placed them on a long sofa table with a string of white lights under a piece of cheesecloth.  This year, they proudly hang above the mantel and have the eerie lighting provided by a blacklight. It is amazing!  The light causes the paper to glow a weird blue and the shadows to deepen.  Perfect!

  My "family" portraits bring compliments from visitors to the Little Bayou House.  It seems that these bring back a lot of memories of happier times...memories when movies were decent. (With the exception of two photographs all are vintage movie monsters.  One is of Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd...not so vintage but definitely from a movie! And one is of a long ago mayor of Biloxi...not a movie monster but definitely vintage!) They are all from an era when times were better. I love my "family"!