Halloween Yard Decorations

This year we decided to up our Halloween yard decoration presentation. We don't do all that much normally, perhaps some spider webs or lights and pumpkins, but no elaborate displays. A few weeks ago I was re-posting the FREE print-and-cut decorations I made available for fans: https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2024/10/halloween-trio-decorations.html and realized I could have those printed larger than standard paper––I could make them big enough to fill our yard!

In photoshop I blew the files up to be about 3 feet wide by 4 feet tall and sent them off to my printer to have them printed on Styrene (used in many outdoor signs.) I made a miscalculation about the thickness though––I thought they were going to be rigid enough to stand on their own (with the help a a stake in the ground) but when they were delivered a few days later rolled in a box, I knew I had extra work to do.

Got some dry erase board material and then did a light palm sanding on the back of the styrene and on the back of the board to give them both some tooth for a glue surface.

Then Julia and I gave each surface a coat of contact cement. This was a tricky part because this stuff is noxious and even outside there were times where taking too deep a breath got you an unhealthy blast of the stuff. But that also meant all kinds of leaves, dirt, and dog hair blew into the tacky surfaces.

If I had to re-do this part, I'd have put a MUCH thicker coat on the styrene (we suspected we needed more by the time we were coating the board). We had better luck pouring a pool and spreading it rather than just using the roller like painting a wall. I also should have used something as a wind screen to help mitigate the debris––though none of it shows through the surface.

Contact cement needs to be applied to both surfaces you want to adhere and then let dry to a a rubbery-tacky stage before pressing them together for the actual bond. When the surfaces were ready Julia and I carefully placed each full sheet of styrene down on the coated board starting at an edge and working towards the opposite edge.

We used a cloth covered squeegee to help push down and make sure every part of the styrene was making adhesion with the board. Normally this is done with a hard rubber roller when contact cement is used for flooring or countertops...but we didn't have anything like that so we improvised with what we had in the garage.

Using my jigsaw I carefully cut around each character using the cut-lines from the free files as my guide. Though to make sure they didn't show, I cut on the inside of those lines.

This step took the longest, and because the pieces were so large, the best place to do this work was on the edge of my deck sitting on the one narrow step...which after two of these is uncomfortable, and after three is really uncomfortable.

There were a few places when all was said and done that the styrene didn't have enough cement to adhere in little bits on some of the edges. I used a tooth pick and super glue to get in-between the surfaces and carefully bond those places without risk of getting any on the printed face.

Here are the witch cat and the pipe and tails devil all cut out and standing freely on their own as I was cutting the contour of the pumpkin skeleton.

As I said, I miscalculated the thickness of the styrene from numbers on the printer's website into inches. I thought they'd be about 3/16" thick, but they were less than 1/16", about the thickness of the chipboard backing of your average notepad.

I cut down some lumber into 4' tall sections and I tapered the ends for easier yard staking. We painted the bottom of the stakes with spray paint (same paint we use to stencil the Soothsayer's Deck bags) both to help them 'disappear' where they they'd still be visible below the characters, but also to help with some rot protection. If I had to do it over again, I'd have painted these all the way up since you can see the paint edge from inside our porch and it looks a little sloppy.

The character were drilled (with a countersink) to accept a short black drywall screw (carefully positioned to blend in with the dark linework) to secure them to these stakes.

Here is our final setup with some solar maple leaf twinkle lights and some pumpkins from our local market:

If you have used the free decoration files (https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2024/10/halloween-trio-decorations.html) in your Halloween celebrations, please share your photos with me on social media (@mouseguard)