How I made those eyes

Someone requested a tutorial for the spooky house eyes. It's a pretty simple process.

1) Go to an office supply store, like Staples or Office Depot, and buy several packs of black poster board. The bigger the sheets the better.

2) Place enough pieces together to fill the window and tape them together. Some trimming and measuring will need to be done so it will fit nicely into the window frame. Our windows are 3 feet by 6 feet so we needed a lot of poster board.

3) Once the two panels are taped together, draw an eye on one of the panels. I made sure the pupil was in the center of ours so it would cover as much of the center window frame as possible. This may not be the case for you.

4) Flip the second panel over and staple/tape it to the back of first panel. I did this so I would only have to cut out the eye once and both would match perfectly. Just make sure you flip over the second panel otherwise you will have two eyes facing the same direction.

5) After everything is cut out place the panel in the window frame and tape it to the edges. This worked out fine on one window because there was nothing in front of it. However, the second window had a desk in front of it and made it difficult to tape up all the edges. The lack of proper taping and the fact that our windows get covered in condensation on the inside caused the eye to fall down after a few days.

6 - Optional) Cut some scrap wood, I used quarter round, and tack it to the sides and top of the panel. That made it more structural and prevented the sagging.

7) Attach some semi sheer fabric to the back of the eyes so you can't see in the window. Unfortunately, the fabric we used was a little to sheer so you could still see through the windows some. Next year we will just get some better fabric.

8) Arrange the light(s) in the room so it will illuminate the eyes nicely. Usually we just place a lamp in the middle of the room that is sitting window height. If the lamp is too close to the window it won't look right. This will probably involve you walking outside and looking at the eyes numerous times until you find the right arrangement.

The hardest part of this whole process was laying out the poster board to fill the window. I went through several arrangements until I found the one that worked the best for our window. I know this probably isn't a big deal, but I wanted to use as little poster board as possible.

Next year I will most likely get a couple of sheets of luan and cut the eyes out of that. That way I won't have any sagging issues like I did with the poster board since our windows are so big. If your windows are smaller the poster board will be fine.

Since I didn't take pictures while putting the eyes together, here are a couple of after shots so you can see how it was done.

Here is the back side of one of the panels. This is also the one I attached the wood strips to.



Here you can see the panel placed in the window frame and the fabric attached to it. We were lazy and didn't trim the fabric to fit.



This is what it looked like during the day.



I hope this helps you make your house extra spooky next year.

Be seeing you.