Zombie Prom!

On a Saturday night after the library closed, a rare strain morphed teenaged patrons into brain-eating, make-up put oning, Thriller dancing zombies!

As everyone knows, zombies eat brains because they don't have any of their own, and a delicious way to do this is Jell-O. I took some foil, creased and folded it into a brain looking shape, and put it into a muffin tin. Just add some Jiggler recipe style Jell-O, and you're set.

Adding some red food coloring to pink lemonade makes a tasty blood juice, and dipping pretzel rods into melted chocolate with some almond bark at the ends make for some edible fingers =D

After some munching it was time to zombify ourselves! There were five effects we went for: whited-out faces, dark eyes, rotting flesh, messed-up hair, and blood.

If you buy some Ivory colored foundation and some dark eye shadow, you get some deathly looking skin with sunken eyes. For girls, tease your hair out, and for guys, mess it up!


You can do rotting flesh two different ways. Mix about equal parts of flour and corn syrup into a sticky paste, put it on your skin, and then press some toilet paper onto it. This becomes a "skin" you can tear, and also looks like rotting skin.

Another way to get the rotting skin look is to mix up flour, corn syrup, corn starch, and water, and apply it to your skin. Mix in the different ingredients until it starts to clump onto your skin. Start with your corn starch and if it's too runny, add some flour, or if it's too sticky, add some corn syrup.

Once you have all this "make-up" applied, add a generous amount of blood. You can mix corn syrup and flour (about two parts corn syrup to one part flour) with one drop blue food coloring and a lot of red food coloring to make a smearing, purplish blood, or use tomato paste for a clumping, red blood.

It wouldn't be much of a prom without dancing, and we thought Michael Jackson's "Thriller" would be appropriate. There is a whole series of YouTube videos that breaks down the dance step by step, and we used that to acquaint everyone with some zombie moves =D

This program was way too much fun and works well with the Summer Reading theme "Own the Night" and the upcoming Teen Read Week theme "It Came From the Library."

Paint the Night!

So my boss's name is Miss Karen (I'd say her name is Karen Yother, but I call her Miss Karen so much more often than Karen Yother lol), and her dad's name is Donnel (for some reason we call him that instead of Don. Maybe we're just weird here hehe). In addition to being my boss's dad, he is also a local artist that just did a program for me.

Basically, we bought each participant a 9x12" canvas board, and had some acrylic paint on hand. We laid down some newspaper on the tables, passed out a small paint pallet (a paper plate works just as well if you can't find them at the dollar store), and gave everyone an inch brush and a detail brush. Donnel took the group step by step through painting a great looking night scene (we figured with a theme like "Own the Night," a night scene was awfully appropriate. The above image is a painting he did that gave him the idea for the night scene that we did).

I'm going to post some step by step pictures of the process, but I'm not saying I could paint it based on the pictures. I'm saying that having Donnel was awesome!

Our Tools

 A pencil gave us a Moon and a horizon line. 

We put some gesso putty in the moon which we'll use later.

We double loaded our brush (put one color on one side, and another color on the other side) and then brushed back and forth. The top was black and purple, we then blended in some blue near the horizon line, and then we used some green and brown for the ground. The trick is to put both colors directly on your brush and then just mix them as you paint back and forth. Gives you a great blended look.

 If you put some white paint on a toothbrush and flick it with your finger, you get some great looking stars in the sky.

Then we took our fingers and scratched the paint off of the top of the putty. That way we can see our moon again.

We added some trees (some black and mostly brown), and some purple, black, and green for the leaves. All that was left was initializing the bottom and taking a picture with a frame! 

Thanks Donnel!

Tell Your Own Ghost Story

So each year, the Collaborative Summer Library Program (representatives from each state team up to offer better and more affordable summer reading programs) chooses three themes; one for kids, one for teens, and one for adults. This year, the teen theme is Own the Night. In addition to choosing a theme, they also offer incentives and prizes and a manual full of program ideas.

One of the suggested programs was making up your own ghost stories, so I thought we'd make a program out of it by giving our older tween group (6-8 grade) some suggestions and then videotape what they came up with.

I figured that like most stories, there were certain things that a ghost story would need (who, what, where, etc.) and I wrote the questions down and some possible answers to them. I gave an answer sheet to each participant, made up my own story to show that it wasn't that bad, and then let them at it. I've posted some of the videos on my YouTube Channel, and the rest will be coming soon.

Enjoy!


P.S. Here's the questions that I asked just in case the program sounded interesting :)

Who are you? (TV reporter, Ghost survivor, local farmer)

When did you first hear about it? (Childhood, 10 minutes ago, sometime last year)

How do you know about it? (Lived through it, your friend survived it, heard it from some neighbors)

What is this thing called? (The Big Hairy, Terribleautapus, The Reptile)

When did it come into existence? (18^th century, last week, every eclipse)

How did it come into existence? (freak experiment, untimely death, no one knows)

Where does it lurk now? (an old house, graveyard, in the library)

Why should we be afraid of it? (decapitation, tickles people to death, creeps up and says boo)