I made up a fun craft that I really enjoyed doing with my daughter, and I wanted to share it with you all!
I was trying to think of a fun Halloween project that I could do inexpensively but high impact… being a physician I guess coming up with a craft that uses exam gloves and casting plaster just makes sense!
But all of these things are very easy and inexpensive to get… you can get rolls of gauze that are saturated with plaster here for about $6 a roll. You only need one roll per dismembered hand… now there is a sentence you don’t hear very often! You’ll also need one exam glove, found at your local drugstore.
All you need beyond that is a bowl of water and a cardboard tube you can recycle from toilet paper or paper towels.
1. Blow the glove up like a balloon and tie. Sit it on top of the paper tube (you may want to secure it with a bit of tape, just until you get the first strips of plaster on, then it will hold itself together, so you can skip that step.) I also used a square of old cardboard from a box as a base, to try to contain mess.
2. Cut the plaster gauze roll into strips… some long (to drape all the way down the arm) and some shorter (to wrap around the fingers.) Begin plastering the hand by dipping one strip of gauze at a time into a bowl of warm water, trying to keep it as untwisted and flat as possible, and draping it over the hand. I recommend going in between the fingers and connecting the hand to the wrist first.
After a few anchoring strips like that, make sure to concentrate your efforts around the base, building up a nice sturdy wrist and a nice wide base to hold the weight of the hand. This craft is straight forward, easy and fun, but recommended for older children and adults. My 10-year-old had no problem getting the hand sculpted, but it was a bit too tricky for my 8-year-old.
3. Allow to dry for several hours, then paint! We went green zombie with one hand and decomposing werewolf claw with the other.
We used black Sharpie markers to draw stitches on, and a bit of red paint for blood…
… would you dare snatch some candy out from under this dismembered zombie hand?
For this rotting claw hand, we tied one of the fingers down and covered it with plaster so it looked like it was chopped off. We then melted a bit of red crayon (by holding the tip over a flame) and letting it drop onto the stump area! For more crayon melting fun, check out this art tutorial here.
We also added fake fingernails that we clipped into points (claws) and attached with a hot glue gun. Love it!
Let your creativity run wild!
You can string colored lights in between the fingers, put it in a bowl or platter, just leave it bare (it already looks like a Mummy after all!)
You can paint it skin colored and add rings and watches to make it look like a chopped off human hand, add fur or hair, fake fingernails, blood… go Vampire, go Zombie, go Werewolf… you name it! I’d love to see what you come up with!
Need more fall inspiration? Check out my super easy super inexpensive ghost cape costume that I made last year (tutorial here) for Halloween, or make a batch of Caramel Fudge Popcorn this weekend!
Happy Halloween to you!! xoxo
