If there’s a holiday made for makers, it’s Halloween. On this night, you can proudly wear your most bizarre creation around the neighborhood. Or invite neighbors to explore your elaborate, homemade house of horrors. To celebrate the maker spirit of Halloween, we created this special issue, a joint project from the editorial and design teams of MAKE and CRAFT.
We set out to cover ways you can make your homebrew Halloween more fun and exciting. We wanted to highlight the DIY skills of makers who are high-tech pumpkin carvers, ghoulish makeup artists, wizards of light and sound, and fright-night puppeteers and prop masters. We’ve collected the best ideas in three sections, hosted by three special guests: Creepy Costumes and Macabre Makeup, hosted by Edith Headless; Devilish Decorations and Frightful Feast, hosted by Betty Croaker; and Haunted House, hosted by Blob Villain.
Halloween can be as low-tech or high-tech as you want. You can make scary things in the kitchen or in front of the bathroom mirror. Use a sewing machine or tools in a machine shop. Put a monster puppet on your hand or on a pneumatic device. Turn lights on and off with simple switches or with microcontrollers. One piece of advice we’ve heard repeatedly: start with a single project one year, and then add another one the next year.
Remember, Halloween is the perfect occasion for out-of-the-box thinkers (especially if the box is a coffin). Halloween allows you to recycle and reuse anything, from clothing to electronics. So let your imagination run wild, and then get together with friends to bring these ideas to life. Halloween is what you make of it, or as Vincent Price once said, “It’s as much fun to scare as to be scared.”
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