Make A Halloween Cauldron

There are lots of projects out there for halloween, everybody has costumes but you don't see tutorials on how to make a cauldron very often. This is an easy tutorial on how to make a nice big cauldron for your halloween display. It is fairly easy to make and to build it took me about four hours. To paint it was another hour. You can probably do it faster because I had to figure everything out.

Eye of bat and tongue of newt are not included with this project :)

If you are looking for kids halloween costumes and stuff Amazon.com has a great store for it right here

How to Make the Cauldron

Here is a picture of the completed caudron. The coffee mug is there so you can get a sense for the size of it. It is about 2 feet in diameter.

I used a foam product to make this cauldron. It is an insulating foam called foamular and all home improvement stores sell it. Places like Home Depot and Lowes.

It comes in sheets of varying thicknesses. I used the sheets that are two inches thick.

One note about painting this cauldron. If you don't coat the whole thing with Plaster of Paris like I did you have to exercise some caution when painting it. Some spray on paints will actually eat right through the foam. I mean just put holes and craters right in it. A safe spray paint you can use is called H20 paint. It is a latex spray on paint made by Krylon and is available in most hardware or home improvement stores.

Krylon K02605000 H20 Latex Aerosol Spray Paint, 12-Ounce, Black Sea

Cut a bunch of squares of the insulating foam and stack them up. I used 9 slices to make it 18 inches tall. I cut each sheet to be 24 inches square.

Step 2

Cut all the squares into circles. You can use just about anything to cut it from a knife to a saw or a foam cutter.

Cut out the top several layers into rings. I left the bottom three rings uncut so the cauldron could hold things like props.

Glue it all together. You can use hot glue gun, regular white glue, carpenters glue or Great Stuff like I used. I like the great stuff because it dries quickly.

Use various tools to sculpt it into a cauldron shape. You can use small saws, rasps or even a belt sander like I used. This picture shows it before I started sculpting it.

This step is optional but it does make the cauldron look a lot nicer! I mixed up some plaster of paris and brushed it on. This gives it a more uniform and metal look. I did this three times and it is easy with the plaster of paris because it dries in half an hour.

Paint it black and add some kind of handle to it and you are done. .The handle I used is actually the leg from an old metal chair. I just carefully bent it. You can use anything for a handle. This cauldron will be suspended from some kind of a wooden tripod.

Some thoughts on how to make it spookier. You have plenty of options when it comes to working with this cauldron. You could get dry ice and put it inside so it gives off smoke. Or you could put a smoke generator in it. You could put a light inside and put a red cover over the light. Because it is foam it would be easy to poke a hole through the bottom so you could run a cord through it to power something up. A fan and red streamers would be kind of neat so the red streamers all stream upward as if there were a fire in the cauldron.

Here is my cauldron on display along with a gravestone I made. That is an easy project that you can do in half an hour: How to make a Halloween Gravestone

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