The past few days have been filled with lots of little projects. We found cool, old world looking paper in a mottled ecru and printed all the labels. Sadly I forgot to take the extra paper out of the printer so the girl-child printed some homework on the rest of it.
The jars were filled with bouncy balls (eyeballs), udon noodles (entrails), rubber snakes, frog and lizards. Each jar was filled with water then a kaleidoscope of food coloring. The rubber lizard looks really cool floating in greenish-blue water. Once the labels were pasted on the jars, we started creating lids and seals using string and crayons. The string is hot glued around the lids and the tops of the bottles. other vessels have a variety of crayons melted and dripped down the sides.
We tried out the glow stick lights inside one of the jars. It did not have much impact. We may need to go to bigger, brighter glow sticks or use actual mini-lights on each shelf.
The last layers of papier mache were done for the cauldrons. I used extra glue to try and stick down any edges that were sticking up. Rainy weather prevented them from drying outside so each layer took a day to dry. One looks like a cauldron; one still looks like a lopsided Saturn. But, as my daughter pointed out, after Halloween we could repaint them to look like giant Christmas ornaments.
Once completely dry, I painted the outside with black gesso. Gesso smells really strongly. Ugh. Then I took them outside (fortunately the weather had improved) and spray painted them with a matte black both inside and out using a spray paint booth I made from a large box. I dusted the outside of the smaller cauldron with black sand while the paint was still wet to give it a glittery, iron look.
My son had collected bunches of weeds from a local field and hung them up outside to dry. I tied ribbons around the bundles so they can be hung up at the apothecary.
Finally I printed and mounted two signs for the apothecary. The signs are smaller than I would have liked because I was limited by the size of paper I could feed through my printer. But the beige signs are still readable mounted on black paper and propped up with cardboard.