All Activity

Last year I added Patriotic candles they were custom repaint repurpose. This year I’ve decided to add a patriotic snowman, but once again they are hard to find and when I did find one, I didn’t want to pay what was being asked. So I decided to do a Custom Repaint / re purpose a regular blow mold snowman. I think he turned out good, I think he looks better than the picture shows. I will include last year picture of where he will be displayed. LOL I may have to re arrange them. The project when fairly well, biggest problem was the paint removal. I've removed paint from blow molds before, but never had this much trouble. the picture is after about 11 attempts. As you can see I still didn't get it all off. There is a Santa Face in the background that I just got, and one of the previous owners had re painted it with a brush. I was able to strip it all the way down in one application.

Don't do it. I don't even have facebook anymore. And my wife is on the BLM facebook group and it has become a nightmare over the past 4 years. People are rude. People act like their idea is better. People complain about prices, quality, and everything in between. It makes it not fun. Sadly, thats what facebook does.

Not a blow mold, Pumpkin repurpose. Wanted a “lighted” pumpkin that didn’t have a Halloween face for Thanksgiving display. Found a plastic Pumpkin full of candy at Target. So I’m going to remove the candy and re-purpose it. I will make a hole in the bottom for a c-7 lamp socket. LOL this thing has a recess in the bottom that looks like it was made for it. I’ll post more picture once I get started on it. Completed this project: Here is the pictures of the results. I already had the c-7 lamp socket and the hole was easy to make. It really lights up good! The picture doesn’t show very good. I may take another picture tonight just to see if it shows better. Hey for $ 20.00 you get a blow mold decoration and get a bag of candy

I been thinking about we’re to take my little boy to see / do. To have Christmas memories of things I did as kid in 1980s. Below is from local paper about background of pink pig. To compete with other stores at the time, Rich’s publicity director Frank Pallota came up with the idea in 1953 of adding “Priscilla the Pig,” according to the website. In 1955, Rich’s moved “the Pink Pig to the roof of the store, where it ran on a monorail and left the store through an opening that allowed kids an up-close view of the Great Tree, Atlanta and circled the toy department inside,” according to the website. A second pig, Percival, was added in 1964. The rides remained downtown until the Rich’s closed in 1991. “After a brief stint at the Egleston Children’s Hospital’s Festival of Trees, the pigs were put out to pasture at the Atlanta History Center — only to be reborn in 2003 under a pink-and-white tent at Lenox Square Mall,” Atlanta Magazine reported in 2017. I found on YouTube a home move of pink pig from 1988. The first few minutes you can skip but it brought back a lot of memories. this is played on Atlanta station about Rich’s singing and lighting the tree. We alway watched the tree lighting with grandparents and family on TV. Just thought I would share my thoughts of Christmas past to plan for Christmas future:) We rode the new pink pig in 2019 but they did not have it last year due to pandemic my hope is that they have it this year but we will see.

Same with my lowes. Picked up the snowman blow molds. All the minnies had paint loss though. Gotta get the grinch and stack of presents still. Hadn't seen the penguin before. Might need one of them too!

Went by two Lowe’s in between field meeting. I pick up a pair of Mickey and Minnie. The manger at Lowe’s said all Christmas should be out by next Thursday for southern area. Also Walmart had old general foam pumpkin pals that are made at blow mold plant that Santa’s best used to be made at in Mexico. For some reason my Walmart only got pink ones? Also pictures on table one on left is last years for example of the difference.

I see Mr. Halloween (AKA Mr. Christmas) has a NEW ghost blow mold! See QVC.com item number: H228139

The price is pretty good for 1-3 t-shirt. The ones we just pick up for fall were $16 each.

I was just having a few made for me. But if someone want one I can have more made. Since I am only ordering a few it take a few weeks to get t-shirt in and made. The one I ordered Bella canvas made USA soft t-shirt. I told them to get what ever color t-shirt they thought would look good.

I just take them apart and replace the lighting using SPT wire with vampire sockets and plugs....easy and fairly cheap! Using LED candelabra base lights can be very bright.

Scottrob: are you planning on selling these? I’m only curious, not committed. Scott M.

. I thought about having some T-shirts made up to wear when I am working on my display with plant Christmas logo and Santa on them. Our T-shirt person make a lot of custom t-shirts for our little boy. At fair price they have cool high end huge printer that look just like screen printing on shirt. Well I have set up some of my Halloween items up and toke some photos and have sent my t-shirt people the design I want. So in a few weeks we’ll see how the t-shirt turns out. Below is the proof they sent me last night. I was going to put big logo on it but I did not hear back from Chuck if it was ok to use. So I went with the web address instead. And it’s for Halloween t-shirt. If it turns out good I will make a set up for Christmas. Right now with everything packed up its hard to get to a lot of Christmas blow molds out without filling up basement. Also I picked the Halloween ones based on ones close to front shelve and that I liked. I also had thought about putting something on back of t-shirt but just left it blank for now.

www.maxwarehouse.com has some of the Cado (Union) blow molds and they are saying they will ship them for free! However the Santa and snowman are way over priced.

The new horn came in the mail today!!! It looks really good and will work well with others I think. The plastic is a bit thicker and it comes in two pieces with treads and I could not tell we’re to half meet once screwed together!!!!

I'm not a fan of battery operated lights either but I can see why they are being sold this way. Anything that attaches to house current versus being powered by replaceable batteries must meet a lot of regulatory hurdles such as being "UL or CSA Approved" for sale in the US or Canada. The other reason is that the battery operated lights are very inexpensive to produce. Go to your local Dollar Tree and look at the small solar powered driveway markers. Each one contains a solar array, a tiny Ni-Cad cell, and an LED. It boggles my mind that the Chinese can make one of these cheaply enough so that they can be shipped around the world and still be sold for one dollar. A lot of people just use the pumpkins for a couple of days around Halloween. It's a lot easier for them to pop in three batteries and use them than hook up an extension line from the house. Given the number of these that show up in my local Goodwill outlet, I would say that a lot of people consider them a throw away item anyway. That's great for me as I picked up at least two dozen of these over the past two years in various sizes and types. I just convert them to 12V LED (see recent post on battery conversion).

I see Target has a new larger blow mold jack-o-lantern or at least one I don't have yet but it's but it is battery operated. I see this year they changed all the blow mold jack-o-lanterns to battery operated (at Target). I am getting sick of all these battery operated items. Even stores like QVC.com have almost everything they are selling indoors and out is battery operated. Why do they think people want all this battery operated stuff? I hate having to to find ways to make battery operated stuff plug-in. And why would anyone want all this battery operated stuff for outdoors? It makes no logical since. *It makes no logical sense. SORRY TYPO.

Alternate ways for converting battery operated LED lights. You can easily power a group of battery operated lights using a 4.5V DC converter for those lights that use 3 AA or AAA batteries (or even three button cells in series). Just buy a "4.5V DC Wall Adapter Regulated Power Supply 1A" on eBay for $7 and wire up the lights to the adapter https://www.ebay.com/itm/264425077629. This is especially good for those lights that are more than just illuminated with a white light inside. The hanging lantern with swirling lights modified by Scott Rob is an example of this. Unless you buy a special bulb, you no longer have the swirling RGB light. The output for this adapter is 1000mA at 4.5V so you should be able to wire up several lights to one adapter. It may still require you to open the light but you can solder the wires to the battery holder. Just do it carefully so you don't melt anything but the solder. The alternative I prefer is to use a 12V DC source for all my conversions where possible. I can get a fairly sizeable converter (100-500W output) and wire many to one power supply. In order to match the output from the LED power supply you need to add a buck module to reduce the voltage from 12V for battery operated lights using 3 or 4.5V. They are cheap and pretty easy to use. Here are three that I have used for my conversions. They range from 50 cents each to around $5 for the deluxe model with built in voltage meter. The least expensive ones are a bit difficult to set to the proper voltage so I would recommend the middle version, about $1.40 each if you buy 5 at a time. You can wire several battery lights up to one module as the output can be up to 3A for the two larger modules. An advantage of using 12V directly is it lets you use inexpensive bulbs that were intended for auto or home use. Here are an array of bulbs that I use for my conversions. You can buy the bases shown below the lamps but it is just as easy to solder wires directly to the bulb leads. These are (l-r) T10 auto bulbs 10mm white with the base removed, RGB color changing, single color Red, single color Blue and then three G4 base bulbs, 300 lumen chip-on-board, 24 LED, and 48 LED. The last three will work on 12V DC or 12V AC. The last time I ordered 20 white T10 bulbs they were only 11 cents each ordered by slow boat from China. The ones on the right ordered on eBay ranged from about a dollar to $1.50 each if you order 10 at a time. The G4 bases are a dime each if you order 10 from China. I just bought these two Halloween pumpkins at Goodwill surplus. The black one was powered by three LR41 button cells (really small cells) and while the light still worked it was pretty dim so I removed the two 5 mm RGB color changing bulbs and replaced them with a single T10 RGB bulb. The other came with a 110V, 15W incandescent bulb in the base. That one became a 24 LED 12V 300 lumen light. The two small LEDs are 5mm RGB LEDs like the ones that were on the base originally.='

My Lowes has Christmas stuff up top. The guy there told me they're waiting on more shipments before putting it out. I keep going back every couple days to have a chance to snag some blow molds early.

Went to Sams Club yesterday they had out some of there Christmas stuff.

I was at my local Lowe’s yesterday and they have a bunch of Christmas stuff in boxes, looks like it just came in. That would be really cool if they have those.

Oh boy, I wish they would make a replacement crow for my Union Garden Scarecrow, but since I am probably the only person hoping for one I don't think it's very likely...LOL!

I was looking for a replacement TPI angle horn and noticed the blow mold store now has them for sale! I ordered one of the gold horn. With sipping it was $30. But at current blow mold prices it was cheaper than the last one I saw on line. I will let you know when it gets here how it looks beside some that have their original horn.

Hi Chuck, I'm sorry the traffic has dropped off of PC so much. I have to admit I read over the LOR forums almost daily but haven't been here in a long time. I started coming back a little over a week ago. Your site has always had great information and I would love to read the "magazines" that you would put out. I've met a few people in real life that are or were on here and have even picked up some freebies and bought items from some members on here! I would hate to see PC go to Facebook exclusively. As mentioned before maybe start a FB account/page and post every once in a while directing people to check out this site, mentioning something that you or someone posted in this forum or an article that you posted. I can't thank you enough for all you've done for me in the past. You were the one that taught me to sequence at the LOR Jumpstart classes I attended in Philly and Baltimore. You are my mentor and I will always look up to you! Thank you for all you do for our hobby. You really do a great job with this site. Have a blessed day and stay safe. Al

Those are really nice. You could try a little heat from a halogen light or something like that, you dont want to much heat but that may help to bring them back to their original shape.