I’ve been working on various projects for Halloween, but I haven’t been documenting step by steps for them. Nevertheless, I know that the blogging world is full of creative and talented people so I’m going to share a few of my projects so that anyone feeling ambitious can try and duplicate or improve on them.
This is a Dollar store champagne glass that I drew on with a permanent marker. The swirls and dots are random, but you could draw bats, witches, spiders, or whatever floats your boat.
Add a skull platter from the Dollar store with some hot glue and you have yourself a fancy raised platter.
This chipper fellow is also a Dollar store find. I used permanent marker to darken up the shadows because they were pretty week before-hand. The vase and skulls are from, you guessed it, the Dollar store as well and the potpourri was left over from a Christmas project a couple of years ago. Its apple and cinnamon scented so it works nicely. The spider was a ring with the ring part cut off.
Here in the close up you can sort of see the “spiderwebs” made from strings of hot glue across the top of the vase
This is one of three tiered serving trays made from some flea market and thrift store finds. The trays from the flea market are made by a company called Basket Ease and the pillars are various fancy glasses again hot glued between layers.
Last but not least we have the garden turned cemetery. I have 5 very active dogs who carry everything off so in order to have any outdoor decorations, they either needed to be up high or out of reach of the dogs. Enter my fenced garden that is fenced to save the plants from my pooches.
We live in a field so there are no trees within a hundred yards of our house. This makes me sad this time of year when I want creep dead trees, but this year I found a solution. We have a large brush pile and in this pile are very long branches from a tree trimming my brother in law did at his house this spring. I pulled out 10-12 of these branches and with the aid of the fence, created a spooky haunted forest around my growing cemetery.
In the picture above you can see the ones I “planted” in the center of the garden by digging a hole about 8-10 inches deep, sticking the branches in the ground, and backfilling around them to hold them in place. It gets windy here, but they’ve stayed put so far.
Here’s our larges tombstone (I have more to put out but they’re locked up in the garage and my husband has the key with him at work) with a bone made from rolled up newspaper and paper mache. It was kind of time consuming, but pretty easy. I hope to get a tutorial up for that soon because I need to make a few more anyway.
Here you can see the tomato cage ghost. I improvised today to see how well it would work. I had a white tablecloth and creepy cloth plus a punching balloon and of course tomato cages because this is after all a garden. I turned the tomato cage upside down, pegged it into the ground with sticks, added the punching balloon to the “top” and draped the table cloth and creepy cloth over top. As you can sort of see in the picture, the balloon is yellow which I wouldn’t recommend for daylight hours, but I imagine once it gets dark, it won’t matter too much.
Last but not least, I added a couple more Dollar store decorations to the main tree to add to the creep factor. More will be going out as I have access to that building in the background where all my decorations are stored. The ones I’ve put out are just the ones I’ve bought this year. Did I mention Halloween is my favoritest holiday of all? Even more than my birthday which tends to suck being New Years with the hungover-ness and all.
So now I’ve added a few more items to your list of things to think about for decorations. I’ve got more on the brain, and a month minus a day to get ready because we do our party the week after Halloween to avoid scheduling conflicts.
Hellesbelles Misconceptions on Life 