I’ve been working on this idea for a few weeks. I first painted the haunted house cut-out which took a lot of trial and error and many erasings before I got something I liked. I wasn’t even sure what style it was going to end up in.
I then tried for many days to write a poem about the haunted house, but I couldn’t get anything really strong to come together. So I decided to use the poem “Haunted Houses” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. At first, I planned to use only one quatrain from the poem and write it next to the haunted house on a wooden plaque. However, I couldn’t find a piece of wood with the right dimensions and size for this.
We have no title-deeds to house or lands;
Owners and occupants of earlier dates
From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,
And hold in mortmain still their old estates.
Then I found this picture frame I bought a long time ago for another Halloween project- one I had never even started. I decided to just write the entire poem, or as much of it as I could, as a backdrop for the cut-out. The end!