Halloween is the season for all of the spooky, heartwarming, costumed, candy-fueled chills. There are cool Halloween traditions around the world. I've been watching horror films in anticipation since August and this has always been my favorite holiday to decorate. There are so many ways to celebrate Halloween. So, thank you for joining me at my DIY Halloween craft station!
Some Fun DIY Crafts for this Spooky Season
Have you queued up The Nightmare Before Christmas, Hocus Pocus, Casper, or any of the many gruesome slasher films, if you've decided to put the "rated R" in cRafts??
Then let's get started.
Black Pumpkin Halloween Decoration
You need: black paint.
When it comes to making bouquets, tabletop decorations, wreaths, hanging and flying creatures, there's a way to counteract the urge to overthink it—if in doubt, paint it black. My craft table setup starts with sharpies, witches' hats, black crepe paper, black poster board, and a handy can or ten of Rust-Oleum "chalkboard black" spray paint.
Not only does the paint work on wood, metal, glass, fabric, and stone, it's got a matte finish that sucks the light out of the air like a black hole and, once it's dry, you can write, draw, and erase on its surface with chalk (a craft on craft bonus).
It's the Great Pumpkin Shortage, Charlie Brown.
You need: gourds or oranges, sharpies or black paint, or a pumpkin carving kit
There are lots of ways to use a pumpkin but nothing as classic as carving a pumpkin,. Last year, we suffered a pumpkin shortage, so here are some pumpkin alternatives. Use a sharpie to draw spooky faces on the peel of an orange or clementine (they make a cute lunchbox surprise). Carve or use paint to decorate gourds. Many varieties of gourds are delicious, roasted, and take a few weeks to ripen, so the uncarved option becomes a recyclable side dish in November.
Floating hats
You need: simple drug store/ knock-off Halloween costume black witches' hats, thick rope, and glow sticks.
Cutting a small hole in the top of a witch hat turns it into a giant ornament. Just tie a thick knot in the bottom of sturdy rope, attach a glow stick or battery-powered LED light to it, thread the knot side inside the hat tip, tie the other end of the string to the eaves of your front or back porch, and repeat as many times as you like to create a whole glowing army of invisible witches, guarding the perimeter. This pairs nicely with outdoor spider webbing and homemade pipe cleaner spiders.
Halloween Bat Attack Decor
You need: black, brown, or gray poster board, cardboard, or construction paper, scissors, and tape or putty for attaching the bats to walls or black thread to make them fly.
Bats are pretty freeform. When drawing your shape, make sure that you've got a head with pointy ears, a furry body, and big wings, but otherwise, bats come in all shapes and sizes. Once you've drawn your design (or half of your design) with pencil on the colored board, just cut, pop them out, and apply them all over the house.
Bat facts: Did you know that bats give birth while hanging upside down? Did you know that baby bats are called pups? Did you know that they poop through their mouths? Did you know that the smallest species of bat, the bumblebee bat, weighs less than an ounce? And that the largest species of bat, flying foxes, have a wingspan of nearly 5 feet? So feel free to take liberties when creating your bats; they're creative, fascinating, Darwinian creatures.
Double double, less toil, less trouble.
*A great trick, when you're creating a string of, well, anything, is to tightly double, triple, or quadruple up a stack of paper to save time while you're cutting. This also works really well when you're trying to create a symmetrical image (like a bat), to fold the paper in half, cut one half of the image, then unfold to reveal both sides.
Dead Flowers
You need: a pot (I used a terra cotta one for gardening but you can use anything-fake flowers don't require much), black spray paint, such as "chalkboard black," to write on the container, a bunch of fake or dead flowers, and a ventilated or outdoor space to spray.
Simply make a bouquet, put it in the pot, and spray paint until there's nothing left but black.
The glorious thing about a Halloween bouquet is that it can be one of the ugliest things you've ever seen. Feel free to slap it together haphazardly. Use old floral scraps and remnants, fabric flowers, paper flowers, real flowers that were alive and are now very much dead. Nothing needs to appear to go together. The stems you start with can be red, pink, green, yellow, rainbow—a sense of color has no bearing here. Everything we put in the pot is about to become black. And, once it does, it will magically come together.
Gallery of Creepy Crawlies
You need: black picture frames or any color picture frames that you can paint black and an assortment of random weird, gross objects to frame.
Frame the creepiest things you can find: spiders, worms, sepia-toned pictures of someone else's ancestors holding rusty farm equipment. This is the season to switch out everything that's heart-warming in your house and replace it with things that are skin-crawling.
Easy and Fun Halloween Decorations
With everything from magically floating hats to bouquets of dead flowers, these fun Halloween crafts are sure to liven up your spooky season festivities. Happy Halloweeny Season.
