I’m as guilty as anyone walking down the craft store aisles in August and September and oohing and aahing over the … frankly…. kind of UNREAL amounts of Halloween stuff that comes out now. I’m a proper millennial and love Halloween but even to me it’s starting to feel very excessive and, how shall I say, landfillcore?

But when I see something black cat related I do stop in my tracks and I gotta admit. Michael’s… ya got me with these two plaster cats. They were just unpainted and unprimed, as bare as can be, and have a little LED candle light inside so they glow. It’s up to you to make them truly yours. And well, I have two black cats for real, so it’s got to be a law somewhere that I must pay tribute to them. Right?

the kitties in progress

I used a black matte spray paint and primer to coat these two and cover the bare white plaster. This layer is always thirsty so it took a few coats. In the photo above you can also see the Arteza pearl acrylic paints I used for spot color, and I used a touch of Windsor & Newton titanium white acrylic for my tuxie cat.

I did have to wonder why the heck the witches hats on these cats had pilgrim buckles? As a New Englander, that just really bothered me. This would not pass muster in Salem. I know many actual witches. Pilgrim buckles? AbsoLUTEly not.

So as I began to make each plaster cat actually resemble the real-life kitties who bless^ and protect^^ my home, I figured I needed to cover up the stupid buckles so they wouldn’t eternally bother me.

I used some dried bean pods from my garden that had a lovely shiny texture and cut them into semi-recognizable shapes (a pumpkin for Pumpkin, and a bitten cookie for Cookie), and hot glued them onto Halloween ribbon. I’m pretty happy with the result!

Finished kitties

There’s Pumpkin, my black cat, in her plaster Halloween-y tribute on the left. And my insane tuxie Cookie is in tribute on the right.

Mandatory cat tax for comparison:

First it’s Pumpkin:

and now Cookie:

They are not biological sisters but they bonded as tiny kittens at the shelter, so we adopted them together, and even now several years later they are still very sweet with each other.

^read: beg loudly for food all the time

^^read: catch and eat mice (good girls!) and put toys in the way of the robot vacuum so they get caught and the robot throws an error (bad girls!)