Jennifer De Angelo Baxter sculpted green snake heads and a headpiece out of foam, aluminum foil and cardboard to conjure the mythical Greek monster Medusa.
She painted an old sheet light green and dipped it in a hardening solution to transform herself into the Statue of Liberty. She handcrafted 200 feathers to make full-body wings for her take on Maleficent, the dark fairy from Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty.”
The 42-year-old public middle school art teacher in Northern Virginia has taken her love of Halloween to head-shaking heights, designing and creating costumes on a budget, using mostly items she has around her house. Her mrs_baxters_art_class Instagram account has drawn roughly 132,000 followers, and she was recently featured in a Better Homes & Gardens’ special issue, “Halloween Tricks & Treats.”
In her countdown to the end of October, she’s been getting up before sunrise on weekends to labor away in her Leesburg home studio, sometimes for six or eight hours a day. She also works on the costumes at night after school’s out.
It’s a joy that can also be challenging for Baxter, who has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), a rare genetic condition that causes chronic pain. The condition leaves her with very loose, overly flexible joints in her hands, wrists, elbows, neck and back. Her fingers bend beyond the usual range of motion — her thumb can reach back and touch her wrist. It also causes hyperelasticity, meaning her skin stretches more than usual. It tears and bruises easily, leaving extremely thin, crinkled and translucent scars that resemble wrinkled tissue paper.
Sometimes, when she’s struck with pain, she has to step out of “the zone” of artistic creation and rest. She’ll wrap her wrists so they don’t ache and put splints over her knuckles to prevent her fingers from bending too far backward when she sculpts.
Still, she said, artwork is her escape.
“When I’m making something, I’m in a tunnel,” Baxter said. “I’m thinking: ‘What can I make cardboard do? How far can I take this material?’ It’s super satisfying to turn trash into something extremely refined.”
The closet in her guest room holds her past creations and has became a gallery of what she calls her “wearable sculptures.”
“I’m living with EDS, and it’s a certain acceptance,” she said. “But I also have the determination. … It’s absolute satisfaction when you’ve been toiling over something for a period of time and then there’s that point when you push through.”
She’s been captivated by the spookiness and delight of Halloween since she was a girl. A self-described perfectionist, Baxter prides herself on the authenticity of her costumes and taking the hours to hone every minor detail. “It’s the problem-solving piece of making a difficult, creative costume that I love,” she said.
She also embraces the chance to escape reality and pretend she’s someone else for a night.
“I like to be villains,” Baxter said.
The weekend before Halloween, she always attends a friend’s grown-ups only party, where she’s taken top-costume honors. On the day itself, she takes her sons, now 7 and 10, trick-or-treating. They’ll often attend a local parade.
She started drawing detailed portraits at age 3. Her mother later took her to a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit. She ended up with a strict German art teacher, who only allowed her to use primary colors, and to mix those to make others. Baxter became a teacher herself 18 years ago.
In her classroom at Eagle Ridge Middle School in Ashburn, filled with artwork, Baxter shows students how to turn mundane objects — bottle caps, cardboard, beads and assorted “weird stuff,” including broken toys with springs and axels, plastic Easter eggs and packing materials with different textures — into art.
She tries to teach the basics, showing her students how to maintain good posture while painting and how to correctly hold a brush without loading it with too much paint.
But with everyone spending so many hours on screens, she tries to keep things lively. She recently had students make miniature rooms from trash and recycled materials, and she lets them get gooey with papier-mâché, which is new to most of them.
“The things they love the most,” she said, “are the things that are super hands-on.”
One of her former students, Madison Schleyer, 18, said Baxter “lit up the classroom,” pushing them to embrace creative freedom and to express themselves.
“You could tell she was so passionate about what she’s doing,” Schleyer said. “She’s one of the lucky people who’s found her destiny.”
Darrel Tran, 18, now a freshman at Virginia Commonwealth University studying mechanical and nuclear engineering, said Baxter would share how she created her own intricate artwork. She taught students how to blend watercolors and use the proper paper.
“She was teaching us to hone our skills,” Tran said. “She spoke from the heart. She had faith in us.”
Because of her EDS, Baxter has adapted her teaching and artwork to reduce pain from repetitive motions, making videos to demonstrate clay and ceramic techniques for her students.
Though EDS is incurable, Baxter said she does not plan to let it stop her from teaching art, or making it.
It’s too much fun.
She has a deal with a Virginia museum to make large-scale papier-mâché insects for an exhibit next year, possibly including a 6-foot-long millipede.
She’s made more than a dozen Halloween costumes thus far, each for less than $100. Each time, the reaction she gets makes her smile.
“Where did you buy that?” people ask.
This year, she is using wreath materials, pearls, and shells to craft an elaborate headpiece for her latest creation: a siren from “The Odyssey.” For the bodice, a friend wrapped her in Saran Wrap and duct tape, creating a mold that she can cut off and slip back on for Halloween. Her husband will be Odysseus, wearing armor, a skirt and a Corinthian-style helmet with a red plume Baxter made from a broom and other makeshift components.
At some point, her health may force her to find new tools to assist her, maybe something to help her hold a paint brush if it comes to that, she said. Maybe she’ll need occupational therapy to try to keep up her strength.
She’s scared of seeing her ability to do art slip away. If it does, “I don’t know what that will feel like,” Baxter said. But for now, “I’m just going to create until I can’t.”
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