Halloween-Mad Scientist

For this year’s Mad Scientist decorating, it’s all about glow-in-the-dark. It was super fun as a kid to get something that glowed in the dark and it’s still fun as an adult, so I designed my whole decorating theme around it. Inspired by uranium glass because it glows bright green under a blacklight, I wanted to mimic the look so I made faux uranium glass labware and tableware using blacklight paint and Mod Podge.  Then, I added extra glow to all the beakers and flasks by adding glowing water, made with water and the ink insert from a highlighter. It’s a very cool effect! I added more glowing elements like glowing mutant plants and a skeleton.  I turned my bookcase into a mutant pumpkin patch with lots of glowing jack-o-lanterns, and I even made fun glowing placemats using old X-rays. I added an academic touch by adding a hand drawn Periodic Table of the Elements, a green plasma ball, and the many black books scattered throughout to add height and interest and a repeating element to tie the look together. Lastly, you’ll see in the video at the end of this post that I replaced the regular bulbs of my chandelier with LED green flame bulbs and covered them with tall plastic jars to create the look of glass covers. This was a ton of fun to create and many weeks of getting the placement just right so I hope you take a look around and find something that inspires you to host your own Mad Scientist Halloween party!  Happy Halloween!

A little trivia about me is that I have a degree in Biochemistry, so naturally I couldn’t design a Mad Scientist tablescape without decorating with the bible of chemistry! I created this simple periodic table using a roll of brown craft paper that I painted with black chalkboard paint and created a grid of rows and columns that I outlined with a white sharpie marker and a straight edge. I added all the elements and details and finished it with a coat of sealer. I think it came out great and is the perfect backdrop to my dining room sideboard filled with black books, a green plasma ball, and labware filled with glowing potions.

I made glowing x-ray placemats using some 20 year old MRI films that I had lying around by taping them to green neon poster board. A super simple idea that really adds to the science-y feel to the table. After I made the placemats, I repeated the x-ray look by transforming a mirror into one of those x-ray light boxes that you see in the movies when they used to have actual x-rays. I bought x-ray scrapbooking paper last year from Michaels, so I simply taped them to the same neon poster board and then taped it to the mirror. I think it looks pretty cool behind my glowing skelly! Don’t you think?

I like to decorate my Halloween tablescapes with floral elements pretty much with every theme and this theme was no different. But for this tablescape, instead of just using glowing flowers I created some mutant plants to adorn my table. I added eyeballs to small spider plants for each table setting and growing out of glowing beakers. I made mutant Vampire Venus Fly Traps as my table centerpiece and an entire mutant pumpkin patch. Enjoy!

MAD SCIENTIST RECIPE IDEAS

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