Haunted Pub Signs

I love the charming signs you see in the UK hanging from the buildings advertising various wares, restaurants and pubs. Most of them are suspended by wrought iron brackets and so many of them are funny, odd and eccentric. My favorite pub in England is in the beautiful and pretty dang old city of York. It's a tiny place in an authentic Norman building constructed in 1180.  (!!!) You wend your way up a very dark, narrow stairway that suddenly opens up into a beautiful and kind of creepy (but smallish) pub that cranks out some of the best food in the city. The beams up there are from a ship that sailed the seas eight hundred years ago.
The place is called The House of Trembling Madness.
Gotta love it.
And the icing on the cake, or the foam on the beer, is that to get to the stairway you have to walk through the most amazing beer shop I've ever seen.
It's a beer drinker's Nirvana.
And they have a really cool sign.
So I started thinking about pub signs as I was playing around with the Round Roman Pediment Tomb as the shape reminded me of the signs hanging like stiff banners down The Shambles in York.
And, no surprise, I'm sure, that led me to haunted pub signs.
Because Halloween is just around the corner.
Halloween is always just around the corner as far as I'm concerned.
Go Halloween.
Here are a couple of signs I imagine would give a person a few goosebumps if you happened across one of them on a dark foggy night.......

For those of you that don't happen to have quarter-inch square dowels laying around and a handy drill press, I designed a simpler way to hang a pub sign.

I found some black 12 gauge wire at the hardware store and cut about 18 inches off the spool, bent about 8 inches and put a curl at the end. I bent the rest at a 90 degree angle and then bent that double.

I cut two 3x7 rectangles out of some 8x8 Heavy Chipboard. I opened the doubled bit of wire into a 'v' shape, laid it flat on one of the pieces of chipboard and taped it into place, making sure the hanging part of the wire is perpendicular to the chipboard.

Then I duct taped the two pieces of chipboard together, making a sandwich with the wire inside.

Don't be shy about taping the heck out that sucker. You want it to be really strong! After that, it was just a matter of covering the whole thing in paper and trimming it out with some trims I painted black to look like wrought iron. I used Rust Damask Wallpaper Scrapbook Paper and cut up sections of the  Chipboard Wrought Iron Flourishes Set to use as the L bracket under the hanging wire (and also in the stands).

The trim under the wire is just some scrap miniature Christmas garland I painted black.
To attach the bracket to my refrigerator, I stuck two Command Large Picture Hanging Strips on the backside of the bracket and attached the other two strips LOOP SIDE DOWN to the other two strips, then pealed the paper off of them and stuck the whole thing to the refrigerator. That way, you don't have to worry about getting them to line up.

Now you have a bracket you can hang your haunted pub sign from and the cool thing about this is you can change your signs out for holidays or for anything you want to hang up there!

For a complete supply list, click HERE.

Thank you for stopping by!