Creepy and Crawly for Halloween

I keep forgetting today is Halloween.  I don’t have any young children at home and we don’t get trick or treaters at my house, so the holiday just gets forgotten around here. I miss seeing all the fun costumes and the little kids all excited for the fun day.  I am looking forward to when my grandson Carter is old enough and I can enjoy the holiday again.

But since it is Halloween, I thought I could get away with doing a posting of creepy creatures.  I don’t know what makes your skin crawl, but mine is snakes and mice.   They give me the willies. Being that we live on a hill surrounded by open space, those two creatures are frequent around here, and it creeps me out.

Last week I was walking down our hallway at 8:00 at night, and saw this!

I thought snakes only came out during the day when it is hot!  Now I don’t go down any hallway or  walk into a room without turning on a light….freaks me out just looking at this picture. {Sorry for the bad pictures in this post.  All pictures were taken with my iPhone}

This weekend I started what I thought was going to be a one day project.  Yeah right.  More like a 5 day project..

We got this bbq island about 3 years ago from Costco.  Over time the sun has bleached the finish on the fake stone fronts to white.  Here is the back of it all bleached out.  You can’t even see that it has a high and lows on the faux stone.

When we bought it, it was a gray looking “stone”.   So I decided I would faux finish the now white “stone” to a more realistic looking stone that matched the rocks in our yard.  Well it is not as easy as I thought, and once I got the finish down that I liked,  it turned out to be a 4 step process

First step, cover the whole thing with a raw umber glaze, already a huge difference, but it still didn’t have enough depth

As you can see from what is sitting on top of the bbq, I have a concoction going on.  I am mainly using raw umber for the base and then going over it with a mocha glaze and then adding highlights of dark and light with acrylic paints.  I am using a rag, and an artist brush to put on the different layers. I am going to seal the whole thing with a clear polyurethane.  Tedious I tell you!

So what is so creepy about doing this?  See that hole on the white part in the picture above?  Well, that is where this guy was staring at me from when I started to paint the backside

Needless to say, I went running and haven’t gone back since.  Today I had my husband check the BBQ out from head to toe to make sure there aren’t any more creatures inside so I can finish my “one” day project.

I hope all of you who get trick and treaters and/or little ones to take trick or treating had a wonderful time.  For me,  I will be out painting until the sun goes down or sooner if another creature comes scurrying out of the bbq.  When my masterpiece is all done, I will post pictures, but it might be awhile at this rate