“Excuse me, but I couldn’t help but notice that strange and interesting plant in the window!”
Treetopia invited me to join their “13 Haunting Tales” Halloween tree campaign, and even though I had just completed my edible ornaments tree, I loved the idea of decorating my 7.5 foot Tuxedo Black in the theme of a favorite/classic Halloween character.
I went through several classic ideas and randomly became obsessed with re-creating Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. She’s not classically Halloween-y, but HORROR is in the movie title, so it seemed Halloween appropriate!
We also decorated a matching Tuxedo Black wreath that Treetopia kindly gifted us. Manda actually started to decorate the wreath before the tree while I was still at work. It was a nice visual exercise that helped establish what the tree would end up looking like.
Here’s the little sketch that I started with to help guide us:
We decided to name our tree Audrey III, especially because there are three big heads!
To get a really moody/creepy feel, I bought some green light bulbs to cast an eerie glow onto the whole scene.
Audrey III looks awesome whether it’s night or day, LED lights on or off!
All of our Audrey heads are paper mache. We bought 2 different sizes of balloons and started with a glue and water mixture. However, the glue was taking forever to dry AND it didn’t feel like it was hardening, so we decided to switch to a flour and water mixture, which was much better. We also turned on a space heater and a regular fan to keep warm air circulating in our garage to expedite the dry time.
It was really exciting to get to the part where we cut them open!
Manda took the lead on designing how we would paint all the heads. I was like, “Make a chart, like a makeup chart for a fashion show.” She also painted all of the leaves, vines, and the flowers that are on the backs of the little heads. This was an extremely collaborative project, which was super fun. As usual, there was not a lot of time to work on this, so ideas were thrown out quickly and decisions were made on a dime. There are still a lot of little details, like ivy leaves around paper vines and putting together a flower-shop feel with some of our real plants and some artificial ones. The house has never felt so jungle-y and I am so into it!
