On October 29th, my lovely assistant and I attended a circus-themed Halloween party at a friend’s house in Maryland. Well, I hate to arrive at a party empty-handed, so I decided to make a suitably creepy and theme-oriented host gift.

We had decided to do sideshow costumes. I was the Tattooed Woman, which I accomplished via the cheater method of printed nylon shirt and stockings. My lovely assistant was the Bearded Lady, in a rather fetching leopard print wrap dress and the blonde bouffant wig from my Barbarella costume. What else does every sideshow have?

Things in jars.

I decided to take an old pickle jar that had been lying around (I had some vague notion months ago of using it for something, thus why I kept it) and make a fake freak – a gaffe, though it’s generous to describe my attempt in such lofty terms, as usually a gaffe is an attempt at making a realistic-looking freak.

For some reason known only to my twisted subconscious, I felt that conjoined twins were the way to go.

It was surprisingly difficult to find what I needed. I wanted two inexpensive baby dolls, small enough to fit together inside the jar, with entirely plastic bodies. I went through pink aisles at several stores before I located them. One blue-eyed and one brown, these were bathtime toys – no plush bodies here – and they were perfect.

First they needed to be removed from the insane bondage of their packaging, and then I had to divest them of their clothes.

Naked plastic babies, surrounded by the implements of their doom. Their tiny rubber duckies watched the carnage with strangely amused expressions.

The next step in their transformation was to remove their limbs. Easy enough – they pop right off:

Brace yourself: next is the cutting.

I knew I wanted the twins to be joined at the torso and the cranium, so I needed to cut away those areas so they would fit together.

Here you can see the seam I cut to allow one doll’s torso to fold smaller and fit inside the other. I carved away the limb openings on both dolls to achieve this.

A front view:

I had to rubber-band the heads to keep them from separating while the hot glue cooled. In the final product, you may be able to see that the heads separated a bit anyway.

I covered one of the most obvious seams with the ear I cut off one of the dolls, and glued an arm over the groin seam. One of the spare legs covered the back seam.

Then it was time for paint.

I used a mixture of green, yellow, red, blue, black, and cream-colored acrylic paint, in varying amounts to get a shifting color scheme.

Then it was time to carefully compress the doll so it could fit through the opening in the jar.

Unfortunately I got a little too enthusiastic and went ahead and filled the jar with water before the paint was completely dry. This resulted in the water being way too cloudy, and some of the paint coming off the dolls. I poured out the water and let them dry a bit before refilling.

Here’s the final product. I used three drops of neon green food dye and a drop of purple to get the water color I wanted.

As you can see, some of the paint washed away from their faces. I couldn’t get a better photo, but believe me, this thing is super creepy and if you don’t look at it up close, it’s surprisingly realistic.

My friend loved it, which made me feel a bit less like a weirdo for making it. But believe me, I’m well aware of how twisted this is.