| Backstory
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| Janice walked in the door from a shopping trip to Costco with a box of orange LED Halloween lights and said "Here. Do something for Halloween with this." I took one of the two 100-light stands out of the box. The lights were tied in three-equal appearing bundles. I didn't have much of an idea. I already use a bunch of orange lights wrapped around wooden frames to creat a large glowing Halloween pumpkin face that I hand in our front tree to celebrate Halloween...but hadn't been thinking about getting more lights and creating something else. But I accepted the challenge. Very quickly it came to me that the three clumps of lights could easily be hung as they were to create a pair of eyes and a nose...and that the second strand of lights could be wired together into one big linear clump to form a mouth. Voila! I had the idea of creating a small glowing pumpkin face that could be hung on one of the trellises on our back deck so we can see if through a window from our bed (we don't get to enjoy the big face in the tree in the front yard as much, so this would be just for us. Now I needed to create a frame or hoop in which I could hang and wire the LED lights. I pulled out some of my 18-gauge annealed steel bailing wire, but concluded that this was not going to be sturdy enough for the outside hoop (but would be a good and stiff enough to wrap around the lights and position them within the hoop). Decided that the wire used to make clothes hangers would probably work and that I could make a hoop out of the straightened wire from two or three hangers. Had to dig through some old closets to find some old "gold" hangers which are made out of heavier wire than the thin white hangers that are used today. Sat down with materials and constructed the pumpkin face you see here in about a half-hours time. It's hanging outside now and looks great in the dark.
Janice handing me an object and challenging me to do something with it reminds me of a bit that comedian Jonathan Winters used to do on his TV program in the 1970s. Without foreknowledge, he would be handed an object (often an everyday object) and he would immediately try to turn the object into a comedy routine...usually by seeing how many creatively bizarre uses he could dream up on the spot. Sometimes, however, creativity shows up as a decorative craft and the ideas for building it.
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