The original version of this page was a list of Halloween link exchanges from the middle of the last decade, and essentially none of it survives. Rather than preserve a graveyard of dead links, this page has been rebuilt as something more durable: a short set of references that are actually useful when building props, all checked live. They are grouped by what you would be doing when you need them.
Everything below is an outside organisation. We have no connection to any of them and receive nothing from linking to them.
Fire safety for lit and fabric props
The most under-appreciated risk in this hobby. Decorations are dry, close together, and lit.
- NFPA — Halloween fire safety. The National Fire Protection Association's seasonal guidance. Short, specific and directly relevant to costume fabric, candles and lit decorations.
- NFPA — home fire safety. The broader library behind it, including material on extension leads and overloaded circuits.
- US Fire Administration — holiday fire safety. Seasonal decoration fire statistics and prevention; worth reading before a first yard display.
- US Fire Administration — preventing home fires. The general programme, including the guidance on oily-rag storage that matters for anyone using wood stain.
Tools, blades and protective equipment
- OSHA — personal protective equipment. The plain-language overview of what protection is for and when.
- OSHA — eye and face protection. Relevant every time a coathanger is cut under tension or a wire brush is used on foam.
- OSHA — hand and power tools. Covers the jigsaw and drill work in the sign and candy-dish builds.
- OSHA — electrical safety. Background for anything mains-powered in a damp yard.
Paint, stain and solvent work
- EPA — volatile organic compounds and indoor air quality. Why staining and spraying in a closed garage is a worse idea than it feels like.
- OSHA — ventilation. The principle behind "work outdoors or move air through the space".
- EPA — Safer Choice. Useful when picking a water-based product over a solvent-based one for indoor work.
- OSHA — respiratory protection. If you are spraying regularly rather than occasionally, this is the page that explains why a dust mask is not the right answer.
Subject reference — for building things that look right
A surprising amount of prop realism comes from looking at the actual animal before bending the wire.
- US National Park Service — bats. Wing structure, proportion and roosting posture, all of which improve a wire bat enormously.
- Bat Conservation Trust — about bats. A clear, well-illustrated reference on species and anatomy.
- Australian Museum — spiders. Leg segmentation and body proportion. The single most common mistake in a homemade spider is legs that bend in the wrong number of places.
- NASA Science — ultraviolet waves. What ultraviolet light actually is, which is the physics underneath every blacklight effect on this site, including the glowing potions.
Background on the holiday
- Library of Congress — Halloween and Día de Muertos research guide. Collections, folklore and printed sources on where the customs came from.
- Library of Congress. The wider catalogue, which contains a great deal of period ephemera — postcards, sheet music, photographs — that makes excellent reference for a period-styled display.
Other builders
- Stolloween. A long-running independent papier-mâché prop-building site with detailed process documentation. Different material, same instincts: cheap stock, patient technique, careful finishing.
If a link here has gone dead, it has gone dead — external pages move constantly and we do not control any of them. The archive's own projects are indexed on the projects page.