This year we decided to take the Halloween decorations outdoors and created a zombie graveyard. Kashen had a blast making these baby zombies! I mean what’s not to love? Overly loved baby dolls from Goodwill, spray paint, and finger paint! A kids dream come true!
So for the baby zombie graveyard you will need baby dolls, gray spray paint, red paint, gray paint, black paint, wood dowels, and string. The baby dolls I purchased at Goodwill were perfect. They came equipped with crazy hair, missing limbs, and homemade clothes. The spray paint and wooden dowel rods were purchased from Hobby Lobby, and the other paint we already had on hand.
The first step in creating the baby zombie graveyard was to prepare the dolls. We removed the Goodwill stickers, placed tape over their eyeballs, and foil over their hair. The foil was to protect the baby hair from the spray paint overspray.
Once the babies were painted, we left them outside to dry.
Due to scheduling conflicts, they were actually outside for about 2 weeks. Two of the zombies never fully dried and were a little tacky, which I believe was due to the chemicals in the spray paint and the type of plastic the doll was made from. However, that is what I think, I could totally be wrong. The tackiness wasn’t an issue, they were destined for the outdoors anyways.
We then moved the baby zombies inside and the next step was to paint the eyes and blood splatter. We started by painting the eyes white, with a black rim.
We then blended the paint together with a q-tip. We tried mini paint brushes but they were actually a lot harder and messier compared to our fingers and q-tips.
Ashen painted the lips blood red and smeared some blood along the hairline. Once all of the baby zombies were painted, we placed them on the counter to dry overnight.
The next day we took them out to the graveyard and set them on display. To display our precious zombie babies in the yard, we used wooden dowels and pipe cleaner (mainly because it was what we had on hand).
While making the graveyard I discovered we had extremely hard dirt and I lost a lot of women dowels in that process. So, as to not make the same mistake again, I recruited some tools. A long screw driver and a hammer. Now this is probably not the most efficient way to do this, but it got the job done, and the dolls are still standing upright, even as I write this post. To stake the dolls into the dirt, I hammered the giant screw driver into the dirt, which in turn created a dowel sized hole, that I shoved the dowel into. I then placed the baby zombie next to the “pole” and secured it with the pipe cleaner.
The baby zombie graveyard turned out creepy, to say the least. It was great watching Kashen’s creativity come out during this process.
As with all of our crafts, this one was fueled with wine. I paired it with the Zombie Zin, which I would not recommend trying as it was very acidic.
To watch Crafty Kashen make her baby zombies, click here. And to see my behind the scene version of the video, click here.
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