Mad Scientist Specimen jars

It's not too early to start thinking about your Halloween decorations!
So even though I've posted this before, here it is again. I hope it helps or inspires you to get creative this season.

For Halloween my living room transforms into the the laboratory of a Mad Scientist. His name is Dr. E.Vil Genius.

The furniture is draped with old white bed sheets (Goodwill).

Clusters of glass apothocary jars filled with pale colored water (food coloring), and various fake body parts are displayed throughout the room.

A fake pair of teeth (complete with braces), and a set of vampire fangs sit next to a severed finger. An inexpensive growing hand is labeled as that of a 10 year old who got caught by an angry mother trying to take candy from the candy jar before Halloween. A plastic skeleton (purchased for $1.00) sits in an empty Rum bottle - a shrinking potion experiment gone awry.

In the jar above, I put a head of cauliflower to imitate a prisoner's brain (straight from Azkaban Solitary Confinement). I usually wait until a day or two before Halloween to place the cauliflower in the water so that it doesn't decompose too soon.

For jellyfish stingers, I made threads from my hot glue gun and immersed them into an apothecary jar filled with yellow water. Careful though, you could get stung, I mean burned!

A seed pod, or rubber snake works nicely for this jar filled with blue "pickled preservative."

Below: glowing gooey eyeballs (purchased from oriental trading) represent Werewolf eyes and will bring extra powers for seeing into the future. Plastic skeleton hands (Walmart) look like tiny Hob Goblin hands recovered from the deep forests of England.

To fill the large blue jar in the photo above, I'll trim the stems from a very large Fennel root to represent the "heart" that was removed from an unknown creature found in the Cascade Mountain Range (A.K.A. Big Foot). I've also set out plastic trays and surgery tools with a few rubber body parts. The body parts (ear and nose) were given to us by a "frustrated Dutch Artist" (Vincent Van Gogh). Witch Hazel and Hydrogen Peroxide bottles sit close by. A replica of a vintage anatomical poster hangs on the wall.

Turn off the lights, scatter lots of tea lights around and you are ready for a spooktacular Evening!

For a free copy of the labels I made for the Mad Scientist Specimen jars, Click Here and then download them to print on your home computer. They come complete with instructions for aging the paper and affixing them to the glass jars.