A Spooky Fondness for Blow Molds
I found this really interesting site about blow molds and how to repair and restore them. The site is about Christmas blow molds, but we’ll just pretend it’s about Halloween, m’kay? Carrie Sansing at Planet Christmas tells you how to strip old paint from, fix holes in, and repaint vintage blow mold yard decorations, and it just tickles me to death! I love it that someone took the time to become the blow mold repair expert! And I love it more that it’s a woman, because it feels like I found a kindred soul.
So I have this thing for blow molds. Both Halloween and Christmas, but Halloween blow molds are the only ones I collect. My collection is small (five is a collection, right?) and most are in the rafters in the garage, waiting for Halloween, but I just found two that escaped the curse of the Halloween storage…
This one I’ve had since childhood, and I totally defiled it with red candle wax. And, for some reason, the face is all rubbed off. I think I’ll restore this, as the state of this ghostly beauty is tormenting me.
I picked this one up at a thrift store a couple of years ago. When I find something like this, it feels like I’ve won a prize, I swear. It’s not obvious from the photo, but this Jack is flat and hangs on the wall. It casts a lovely orange glow. I call it mood lighting.
Have you ever seen a mid-century blow mold candy bucket or decoration with “Made in China” stamped on the bottom? Maybe some of the new ones, but not the vintage. It’s classically American, this blow-moldiness. I think I have seen one made in Japan (I collect mid-century Japan/Christmas and specifically look for “Japan” printed on the bottom of stuff), and I just read about some from the UK, but mostly the ones we see in the U.S. are made in the U.S., and I like that… buy local! Even if they were made decades ago.
The rest of my collection is candy buckets. Jack-O-Lanterns, to be exact. They’re not easy to find at thrift stores, but you’ll definitely know when you do. Everyone’s seen the multiple shelves of shocking-orange-pink-purple-blue-green at big box stores, and they pretty much all look the same aside from color. The vintage ones come in five colors (that I know of: orange (usually), white, grey, red, and black. The new ones are prone to just large and goofy grins, and they’re fairly limited to just candy buckets. The vintage ones often have much more character, and you’ll find a multitude of lighted tabletop and yard decorations in addition to candy buckets. They might be grinning goofily, but they might also include words, masks, moustaches, hats, and even cats! They also come in other shapes, like haunted houses, monsters, cats, witches and ghosts. I used my Google-fu to find you some examples. I hope you’re as enamored as I.
via Retro Chalet
via Pinterest
Apparently, someone out there has a less-trashed version of my ghost!
via Pinterest
This vintage blow mold advert is all kinds of fantastic!
I’d like a setup like this. In this blog I will eventually teach you how to make a “cast iron” fence to display your spooky wares.
via Pinterest
via Pinterest
Here’s one I didn’t know existed, and it has me stupid excited! Too bad the Pinterest link is a dead-end, or I’d be hunting this corn-car-witch thing down to nab it!
via Pinterest
Whoooooooo wants some candy?
via Pinterest
Someone has a beautiful collection of Jacks.
via Pinterest
You know, it’s really starting to piss me off that these Pinterest links lead to nowhere. This one should have led to Flickr, but led to a hostile 404 instead. /rant. I’d really like to locate that “treat” Jack. He looks a little drunk.
via Etsy! Finally, a link that goes somewhere! This silly winker is like one of my guys up in the rafters of doom. He’s approximately a foot high… tall, orange and handsome.
via Pinterest, but with no link because it leads to one of those horrifying pages that makes you think you’ve been hacked and need to download some sinister fake file thing to save your computer from being hacked. Which is oh-so-ironic. Nope nope nope.
This is where I quit posting and allow that last one to leave you with one of my childhood favorite songs…