Where I live, we have rural mailboxes. Not that we don't live two and a half seconds away from Costco, Home Depot and Trader Joe's. Nope. We just have rural mailboxes. So Saturday, in preparation for my daily trek of one block, I grab my keys and slide on my flip-flops to shuffle down to the mailbox. I say to Mr. ShellHawk, "I should be getting my book from Ghoul Friday any day now.""Oh," he says, not knowing what I'm talking about. I shrug and head out.
As I open the mailbox, there it is, right on top, Ghoul Friday's neat handwriting announcing the arrival of my latest and most joyful indulgence: Brains vs. Coffee. Back in the house, I jumped up and down and crowed with happiness. I got a raised eyebrow from Mr. ShellHawk until I handed him the book. He read a couple of entries and laughed.
You can't possibly live without this book. You. Just. Can't.
In Ghoul Friday's own words:
"Many of us find ourselves in a zombified state, secretly craving brains. Being upstanding citizens, we recognize the need for a substitute: coffee.
Everyday we must choose between our secret desire for brains and the more socially acceptable cup of coffee.
Brains vs. Coffee: The Daily Debate of the Urban Undead chronicles my struggle as I weigh the pros and cons to consuming, storing, preparing, enjoying and disposing of each product."
I was taking a break from toiling in my Garage of Doom, reading my new book, when neighbor V walked across the street for a visit, coffee in hand. I silently handed her the book. She laughed out loud at the title, then read a few excerpts out loud. We laughed our asses off. A friend arrived to help out with prop building. She read a few and wanted to know where to purchase the book. I told her, and I'm sure she'll order it.
The book, itself, I realized, is like a zombie, nipping and biting, infecting people one by one with its wit. People who, in turn, infect others with the need for brai-I mean, the need to have this book on their bookshelf. I hope you appreciate this bite, because after all, I don't bite just anybody!
Brains vs. Coffee will make a fantastic "Great Pumpkin" gift. If that's not a good opportunity for gift-giving, grab a few copies to give out for that
other holiday. You won't regret it.
Thanks, Ghoul Friday! Now, where's the brai- um, coffee?
This past weekend, I was overjoyed to find that I had no homework assignments due at school (Sure I had an essay to start researching, but it's not due for a couple of weeks), so I spent nearly every waking moment in the Garage of Doom, working on Beloved and other stuff. Above, Beloved has her Drylok on. 
I did the tea-staining step a couple of days before. In Terra's tombstone tutorial, she recommends you take a small amount of paint on your brush and dip it in water before you apply it to the tombstone. I like this approach, and I also tried something a little different, just to play around with another technique. I took a brush and wet down the tombstone, then took a brush with a bit of dark gray paint on it and swiped it over the watered area. When done right, the paint spreads over the area in a sort of watercolor fashion. The bleed looks good, you just have to keep an eye out for water drips. After I did the paint swipe, I went back over the area with a watered-down fan brush if the paint looked too dark and stripey.
A couple of days later, I started the dry-brushing part of Beloved's paint job. This is that part where you take lightly grayed paint , load your brush, wipe most of the paint off on a paper towel, and go to town. This really gives a prop dimension.
Dry-brush step: complete!
One thing I am concerned about is the fact that I couldn't fit any paper towels into the holes in her hair, because I laid her hair out very closely. I can only hope that no rain gets in there and starts to melt her. That would be a major pisser. 
If only I had the $55k lying around! I'm sure I could convince Mr. ShellHawk that we needed this to park out front on Halloween! That's an easy sell, right?
I contacted the gal I bought the crows from, but she was unable to replace the beaks. Apparently, they just aren't sold by themselves. Since I need them for the haunt again this year, I had to figure out how to make some myself. Enter 
While not the most perfect sculpting job ever, I did manage to turn out some serviceable beaks. A dab of hot glue, and ta-
That seemed to make relatively short work of the job. I did go in with my Xacto blade to touch up the sharper lines, though. After that, I marked out the curve of the tombstone using a string and a marker for a compass. This really should be done first, but it's been a bass-ackwards kind of weekend, so it got done after the carving. I used the scoring technique Steve-O recommended for straight cuts. Though it doesn't work as well on curved cuts, it works well enough. I took my power sander to it afterwards to even it up.
I also used the power sander to give the tombstone some dings and weathering. If you decide to do this, make sure to have a good grip on your sander! After I was done with the sander, I hit the tombstone with some cheap black spray paint to age it a little more. Of course, since I made my monster mud for the Beloved tombstone, I'm out of gray paint and will have to pick up a gallon. At least I have a $5 coupon!
So after we had all pretty much proven we didn't know what the Hell we were talking about (in great detail, by the way) Steve-O from the Garage of Evil put his freakin' two cents in:
I have limited experience with casting, so I expected there might be unforseen problems. I expected to have to clean up the seams, because this was plaster and not a professional silicone or rubbery mold I was using. Long story short, I had to break the cast to get the hands out, and I couldn't even pose them because the wire was wrong. Doesn't the picture look promising, though?
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