It’s always fun to adorn your home with spooky decorations during Halloween, whether just for your own fun, to entertain guests, or to make your house look great for trick-or-treaters.
Although many stores sell ready-made kits for certain kinds of decorations, they’re often expensive, and it can be a lot more fun to simply make them yourself. When you do it yourself, you can achieve just the look you want and spend less on the items. Plus, your homemade decorations will be more sturdy, meaning you can use them again in future years.
Here are six simple Halloween decoration projects you can take on. Each project is simple, easy enough to do with children if you wish, and most of them are reusable in the coming years. Best of all, the items needed for each project can easily be found at the dollar store for very little money. Each one will add a great “spooky” look to your house this Halloween season.
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“Forever” mini-pumpkins. These are so easy, inexpensive and nice for decorating. Just get a few glass jars with rings and pick up a package of orange tissue paper, tape and some black construction paper. Cover the outside of the jar with orange tissue paper and tape it into place where needed, then screw on the ring to hold the top of the paper in place. Cut jack-o’-lantern eyes and a mouth out of the black construction paper and tape them to the jar. Get a battery operated mini-candle and put it in the jar. That’s all you need. These look great on the front porch on Halloween night, and you can keep them in storage for years and years without having to buy anything new.
Spiderwebs. Just get a bunch of white yarn and lay it out on a piece of parchment paper in the shape of a spiderweb. Make several straight lines of it radiating out from a point, then connect those lines with short pieces of yarn. Coat the whole top surface in a thin layer of school glue, let it dry for 24 to 48 hours, then flip it over and coat the other side in school glue and let it dry on that side, too. Add a little plastic spider, and you have a great wall decoration, window decoration or something to hang from the corner of a porch.
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Picture frame lantern. If you have three or four identical old picture frames around, get a few small nails and connect them at the corners to make a three-sided stand or cube with the picture sides facing out. Get a few sheets of vellum paper and print some black and white Halloween art and fill the frames with the art without the backing, just using tape to hold the vellum in place. Put a battery-operated mini-candle in the middle, and the sides will glow, illuminating the pictures you printed. Again, these will last for years and you can easily rotate it or change the pictures as desired.
Mad scientist jars. Pick up some rubber animal toys from a dollar store — rubber snakes, spiders and eyeballs, for example. Take a glass jar or clear vase and fill it with water, add a few drops of green and yellow food coloring to achieve the look you want, then add the rubber items you picked up. It will quickly have the look of a mad scientist’s creepy jar from his laboratory. The look of a big handful of rubber eyes in this fake “formaldehyde” is totally creepy.
“Spiderweb” house entrance. Buy some cheesecloth and a simple shower rod that you can hang at the top of a door frame. Drape strips of the cheesecloth across the door frame and tatter the ends a little. It will quickly achieve the visual effect of a spooky entrance. You can affix a few plastic spiders to the cheesecloth as well.
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Simple coat hanger ghosts. This is very similar to the shower rod idea from above, except that you drape layers of the cheesecloth across a coat hanger to achieve a ghost effect. Start by bending the coat hanger into the shape you want, then wrap cheesecloth around it until the hanger is obscured. You can add eyes and a mouth to it by cutting them out of black construction paper and taping them in place. It’s easy to hang these from the ceiling or from a tree with a bit of fishing twine.
You can get all of the supplies you need for these projects at your local dollar store. They’re easy to put together, work well as craft projects with children and will last for years. Happy Halloween!
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6 Clever and Cheap Halloween Decorating Ideas originally appeared on usnews.com
