When we set out on the idea to suspend a 10 foot, black Christmas tree, upside down from our 20′ ceiling in our foyer, the only question remained: What will we top it with?
My friend, Kendell – also my co-host of “The Kendell & Lindsay Show,” food content creator and chef blogger spoke the most obvious truth of my life: A disco skull.
I was on a tight deadline to get the tree finished, decorated and shot for some upcoming content deliverables, so my knee-jerk reaction was to search Amazon for the tree topper I now knew I needed in my life.
A cursory search, and then a subsequent Plan B Google search revealed two things: what was available was not the right scale and even if I settled for one of the incorrect size, it wouldn’t be here for three days. Kendell sensed I was about to ditch the idea and move forward without a tree topper. (In hindsight, I may have just needed a snack. Because – who would I even be if I didn’t have some over-the-top icing on the cake to an already difficult, timely and somewhat risky install involving the rental of a 16-foot ladder, removal of an existing chandelier and hours spent wiring all the branches to stay open, upside down, defying gravity itself?) It was the 11th hour of a major project, deadlines were looming and I was about to press “share” at 99% complete.
Kendell said if I bought the stuff, he’d come up and help me do it. He has created beautiful, eye-popping “Kendell Kreations” as he calls them – also the namesake of his popular (and regularly visited by my family) food blog, KendellKreations.com – using disco tiles in the past. I have one of his artful, disco olives in our dining room he made to commemorate his weekly Instagram Live segment “Martini Monday.”
Kendell, being the Dedicated-to-Crazy just like me, sent out his feelers and among his circle of like-minded creatives who also love to see an extra, outrageous idea come to life, suggested this giant skull from Joann. There were two available for pickup at my local store, so I ordered one online.
A singular Amazon purchase of 16,000, real glass mirrored tiles was next – and luckily was available for Early Morning delivery the next day. I was grateful for the Amazon delivery person in their vest as viewed from my Ring camera, placing the goods on our doormat at 5:15 am.
We sat in the dining room all day taking breaks only to communicate with Josh via walkie talkie up in the attic, working to secure the system that would hold the tree, to switch the movies playing on the iPad on the dining room table to keep us anchored to our seats, or to eat a string cheese or some trailmix. Because, I didn’t have time to make us lunch, but I definitely need my snacks.
The biggest pro-tip to get a realistic, brick stagger of the disco tiles is to unroll the roll of disco tiles into whatever length will work best for your project. You could just lay the chunks of mirrored tiles on your project in the width that they come in, but you’ll notice they aren’t staggered and are in perfectly in line, one row to the next. The beauty and magic from a disco ball is of course, how all the mirrored tiles indepenently work to reflect and bounce light. The more stagger or variation, the more sparkle.
Cut the desired segment off from your roll, and then row by row, slice each strip of disco tiles away from the length you just cut from the roll. We used exacto knives and this handy cutting mat. It sounds a little like fingernails dragging across a chalkboard – but it is Halloween, afterall, so the sound of a blade cutting in between real glass tiles was apropos and checked out on-theme.
Remove the adhesive back and lay the skinny strips across your project. You can manipulate them once placed a little bit, which really helped us get in the nooks and crannies of the skull’s detail. If we hadn’t cut the wide strips down, we would have lot a lot of detail on the skull.
We finished by gold-leafing some teeth and adding a few disco tiles. This is a fancy skull with a bling grill because – I’m a little extra, and so is he.
We left a little spot at the back, top of the head so we could attach a screw, to hang the disco skull from the tree.
Josh drilled in and inserted an eyehook. This is where you could hang your disco skull from another hook in your ceiling, in doorway, or suspend from a chandelier! Since ours was going on the tree, Josh climbed the ladder one more time and attached the eyehook through a piece of wire he attached to the tip of the tree.
Then we ordered takeout thai and had a martini. I put on my blue Shining costume and made a digital double of myself for the content. The brand loved it. I loved it. And I’m so grateful for a friend who helped me do what we obviously needed to do: make our own huge skull disco ball.
Happy Halloween!
