HUZZAH!! It is done!

Now all I see is a great abyss inside our house where radioactive bats circle endlessly!

I know that this isn’t really “art”, but after six hours of taping and measuring and drawing and cutting it feels less like a little crafty project and more like a giant art project. Hence, the blog post.

Last year for Halloween I did black construction paper cutouts of bats that I put in the windows, but I wasn’t happy with them—there wasn’t quite enough light and there was too much stuff in the room around them so that they didn’t really show up. I thought that I would try doing the opposite this year and black out the windows around the bats.

So here is the project in progress—taping construction paper together to fit the four bedroom windows, my sketch for the “bat mural”, and the final cutouts.

You would never guess that there was actually about three hours between the first photo and the third photo. I’m not really a crafty person…at all. I had some problems in getting the bats to look right. I drew out the first sketch (the top one) and that was how I wanted it to look but I forgot that I wanted to do the drawing on the back (or bad) side of the construction paper and therefore I had to do a reverse drawing of what I wanted. I couldn’t just flip it around after drawing it because every window was a completely different size, and not by just a few centimeters, there is a full 8 inches difference between the smallest window and the largest. Super infuriating for me because not only am I not very crafty, but I am also mathematically challenged. Even trying to explain this to you is hurting my head. Then I couldn’t get the reverse image right at all. I finally just did the drawing on the good side of the paper and erased as much of the pencil as I could afterwards. In hind sight I should have just done that from the get-go because any mess isn’t going to show at night-time anyway. This is why I don’t do crafts.

After all is said and done it was cheap to do, just a package of black construction paper, and my daughter loves it which makes it all feel worthwhile. She saw them first thing this morning and ran around the house looking for all the bats. Here they are in the daytime (I have since added some light tan coloured tissue paper to the back of the bedroom ones to obscure the interior a bit more from the outside) and I used some of the cutout bats for the dining room patio doors. Now what category shall I file this post under…