That shrinking feeling

Halloween's coming up fast, so that means I need to start thinking about preparing the decor for the fancy dress Halloween party that it's kinda become a tradition for me to host. Now I have a house instead of a flat, I have a lot more space to fill, so I need to make more decorations! To help out, my friends Lorna and David came over last week, to take part in a bit of shrunken head making. Shrunken heads are fun: made from apples, cloves, rice, and some fake hair/sewn up lips to complete them, if wanted.... when they're finished, 4 of these wee guys will be spooking up my house, and2 will go to Davids for his own party.

We did the peeling, some snazzy facial carving with Very Sharp Knives, and then the messy job of rolling the apples in lemon juice and salty solution, before popping them in the oven to jump-start the drying process, and remove the surface moisture from them.

So here they are after 3 hours in a low oven:

And here they are after another 5 hours of low heat:

Attractive, yes?

They're now sitting on little racks in a tin, along with (to use the technical term), a sh*t-ton of silica gel, in order to keep the dehydration process going (I don't have a dessicator to do the drying "properly"). Hopefully they should be dried out and shrunken enough in a few weeks to start playing....I think I'll sew the lips of mine up, then thread them onto some string, and hang them in the living room window...