Voodoo Dollies

Some of the old thrift/antique store dolls Mrs. Haunted Eve collected and painted for this year's haunt.

Spirit Halloween Creepy Dolls 2023

After the spray paint debacle with the soft vinyl dolls, we found these two creepy dolls on Spirit Halloween's website that appear to be new for 2023. This is precisely the paint effect we were going for with the other dolls. These two dolls fit the bill and will display nicely in the swamp witch's cupboard on Halloween. Done stamp!

Creepy Doll Mask Prop

The old "mask in the jar" ploy using a creepy doll half mask we got on sale last fall.

Painting Mistakes Part 2

Coating the uncured spray paint on the dolls with baking soda has indeed salvaged our "solvent based spray paint doesn't cure on soft vinyl plastics" mistake. The dolls are at least usable now for display in the "swamp witch's cupboard". We decided to skip adding activated charcoal powder because we really didn't know how any of this would work out. The next phase is to test a light coat of water based acrylic matte sealer spray over one of the dolls and see if it actually cures and hardens over the baking soda coated paint. If that's successful, we'll at least apply a watered down black latex paint antique coat over the dolls. If not, the dolls will have to be displayed "as is".

Painting Mistakes Part 1

Ran into a bit of a cluster trying to spray paint a set of four 10" vinyl dolls that will be displayed in the swamp witch's cupboard on our front porch this Halloween. Part of this year's "Haunted Bayou" themed haunt is a twist on "voodoo dolls", inspired by the "Island of the Dolls" in Mexico. So the game plan was to spray paint these 4 vinyl dolls with Rust-Oleum Painter's Touch 2X paint + primer flat gray spray paint, antique them, and paint the eyes with neutral white daytime, fluorescent red under black light pigmented paint. And then realized that soft vinyl plastic doesn't play nice with petroleum solvent based spray paint. Ran into this problem back in 2018 when trying to paint a pair of soft vinyl monster hands. Never had a problem with spray painting latex based monster hands, but the spray paint never cured on the cheaper made soft vinyl based ones. The paint remained permanently sticky on the hands weeks later and the hands were thrown out. Wasn't thinking how these 10" vinyl dolls were "soft" to the touch. The plasticizers in the vinyl react with the spray paint and you're left with a never curing sticky paint mess! You can see in the below pictures how the flat gray paint is now a gooey gloss coat. The paint dried perfectly on the metal eye hooks and wires holding the dolls. We did some research online to see how we can possibly salvage the dolls and the answer appears to be baking soda. We're going to have to "shake & bake" the dolls in baking soda. The baking soda will stick to the paint and will absorb some of the moisture. It may take several applications of baking soda. One online video showed that after blowing off the excess baking soda, it might even be possible to repaint the items, but regardless they should at least be able to be handled and won't stick to everything. We may try to make lemonade out of these lemons by adding black activated charcoal to the baking soda to see if we can at least antique the dolls in the process. The glow in the dark red eyes may be out of the running though. We'll post a "Part 2" follow up as to how the dolls turn out.