Ichor of Abn-Sur

I made this nice little prop set a few years ago and then sold it on eBay. I was quite pleased with the way it turned out. I have always intended to make more of them, but so far I haven't. Possibly because it didn't sell for as much as I had hoped. Also, all that carving is time consuming, and I have a very limited attention span. ...And I hate repeating things. I get bored when I try to repeat something I have already done.

The set consisted of three parts, a box, a bottle of ichor and a scroll. The scroll was printed on 8.5"x14" paper and it was weathered and distressed in my usual fashion, with a few burnt edges and a drop or two of blood (Dragon's Blood ink). It featured text in the Lovecraft font and several seals from my Book of IOZ. I can't remember if the text was gibberish or if it was cut and pasted from an actual occult text (as some of my pages are). It's been a long time. In any event, the scroll was created as a visual prop, and held no intrinsic significance.

The box was about 3"x3"x5", roughly, and was made of bass wood (the common kind of unfinished box you can get at a craft store) with brass hinges and clasp. I stained the whole thing dark brown (American Walnut) inside and out. Then I penciled in glyphs on all sides (except the bottom). The glyphs were also chosen for their visual appeal, and hold no particular significance. The central design on the top of the box is the Seal of Cthigla, which I pulled from my Book of IOZ mythos. The glyphs were engraved using a Dremel tool, then blackened with a Sharpie marker. I gave the thing a few random knocks with a hammer to make it look a little distressed and aged, then I put a top coat on it. I can't remember if the top coat was a polyacrylic varnish or if it was boiled linseed oil. I know I did a box similar to this and finished it with linseed oil as an experiment, but I'm not sure if this was that box.

The glass bottle was one that I got in an odd lot from a wholesale club called "The Flower Factory". I used my Dremel tool to engrave glyphs all around the top and bottom of the bottle, and also one large glyph on the side. The central glyph is the "Sigil of Abn-Sur". It is another glyph of my own devising that has become part of my own little sub-Mythos and that I have incorporated into many of my props. The bottle was then filled with water that was colored (I can't remember exactly what I used to color it, but I think it was green food coloring with some dissolved yellow acrylic paint thrown in) for effect. The bottle had no stopper of its own, so I used a cork. I held the cork in the flame of a butane lighter for a few seconds, then rubbed it with my hands to give it an aged and deteriorated look. Then I tied hemp twine (the kind used for hippie jewelry) around the neck of the bottle and across the cork to act as a primitive seal. I rubbed a little Dragon's blood ink and some soot from the burnt cork into the twine after it was wrapped to make it look ancient and dirty. The bottle fit into the box perfectly. I folded the scroll up and wrapped it around the bottle so it all fit nicely inside the box.

I was disappointed in the price it fetched on eBay (only around $20), but otherwise I liked this prop very much. It was just too labor intensive to make more of them if they weren't going to sell for more than that.