Halloween Crafts
From LoveToKnow Crafts
Who wouldn't enjoy making Halloween crafts? From costumes to pumpkins, sweet treats to harvest décor, there’s almost no end to the fun things you can do to decorate your home, your kids, yourself and your yard when the harvest festivals come around.
Homemade Halloween costumes
It seems like every crafty mom loves to make cool Halloween costumes for their kids. And there are a bunch of websites that can give you ideas for costume Halloween crafts, such as this one, which has a lot of great ideas even if it badly needs to be edited.
Some really basic ideas for costumes involve sweat suits, for instance a stuffed white suit with a few accessories makes a great snowman, or a black suit with black hose stuffed with dark fabric and stapled to the back makes a very cute spider. A black suit with the addition of a poster board circle painted red with black spots makes a ladybug, or a dark colored suit with poster board wings makes a butterfly.
The addition of balloons can make you a cluster of grapes or a bag of jelly beans (use lots of different colored balloons and a clear plastic bag to hold them in). Or with a little paint you could make a cat, dog, rabbit or skunk.
Or you can use a box to make yourself or your child a playing card, robot, race car, Lego block, die or Christmas present.
Old clothes are a great source for Halloween costume ideas. Your kids will love going through your old clothes to become a scary child of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s or ’80s. Or you could find clothes to make them (or yourself) a farmer, a scarecrow, an elderly person, a nerd, Miss America (with a sash you’ve painted with fabric paint) or a ghoulish bridesmaid (with the addition of green or white face paint).
There are tons of other great ideas lurking all over your house. You can dress in your bathrobe, your pajamas, your husband’s clothes. Attach craft supplies to your clothes and be the crazy craft lady. Collect leaves and twigs and make yourself Mother Nature. Drape fake spider webs and spiders over your shoulders and make yourself the spider woman.
Play with puns, like the black-eyed pea (decorate a sweat suit with cut-out Ps and put a black mark under one eye). Or use your interests (or someone else in the family’s interests) to come up with something fun: a cowboy, a fisherman, an athlete. Put your imagination to work and have fun.
Indoor Halloween Decorations
Use your Halloween crafts to decorate your home.
Halloween is a fun holiday to decorate for because you can really keep the decorations us for a long time. Most of the décor will work for the whole fall season, and your house will look festive for months with just a little bit of work.
There’s just something about candles, which set both a warm and spooky mood. Pick out candles in the colors of fall, or black candles if you want to decorate for Halloween specifically. Decorate clear glass votive candle holders with paint pens, drawing leaves and pumpkins or ghosts and witches in black and orange. Or paint stripes on a glass or terra cotta candle holder to make it look like candy corn.
Speaking of candy corn, fill a shallow dish with the sweet treat and then “float” candles on it (don’t let people eat from this bowl).
Make fun spiders to decorate the house with the individual cups of an egg carton. Paint them black, the attach black pipe cleaners for legs and googly eyes. And don’t forget to make some quick ghosts out of old sheets, with batting or fabric for a head. You can paint a face on them or not.
Pumpkins are great for decorating inside and out, whether you carve them or not. Or, instead of carving this year, why not paint the scary or funny face on your pumpkin this year? Or consider buying small gourds in addition to the big carving pumpkins. Bring in some fall leaves and acorns and you’ll have a beautiful harvest centerpiece that will serve you through Halloween and beyond.
It’s also possible to make these small gourds into candle holders by breaking off the stalk of the gourd and carving out a hole for a candle to sit in. These are a little precarious, though, so don’t put them somewhere they might get knocked over.
And you can decorate just about anything with black and orange paper, fabric or paint pens. You can make wall hangings (also with fabric if you’re really crafty) with cutouts of bats, spiders and pumpkins. Decorate plastic cups to hold candy or drinks. Get some holiday fabric (it’s great to stock up at the end of the season) and make Halloween or harvest themed pillows for your living room (or pillow cases for the kids). Or collect little Halloween or harvest themed craft items, such as little pumpkins, leaf garlands, scarecrows, even little lights, and make a wreath out of dried grapevine.
Outdoor Halloween Crafts
The Halloween wreath mentioned above is a great way to welcome guests to your home. Of course a cute little stack of pumpkins and gourds by the door is both welcoming and festive. But if you really want to get into the spirit, your whole yard needs to be decorated.
It’s pretty common these days around Halloween to find orange and black leaf bags. They are decorated like a Jack-o-lantern and when you fill them with leaves, they make a cute decoration that can be placed anywhere in the yard with little danger of blowing away.
If you have large bushes in the front yard, you can create the same sort of decoration for them using a white sheet and black paint. Paint a face on the fabric like you would carve a pumpkin, then drape the sheet over the bush (use bricks or other heavy objects to help hold the sheet in place).
Another great way to decorate the yard is with tombstones. You can use almost any kind of cardboard to make a tombstone, from a cereal box to the side of a refrigerator box. Cut the cardboard so the top edge is curved, then paint gray, allow to dry and write an epitaph for each family member on their individual gravestone, then set the out in the yard.
Of course you could also decorate the door with spider webs and plastic spiders, or just wrap it in black and orange crepe paper, or cut out shapes to attach to the door. Get the kids to draw Halloween themed chalk drawings on the sidewalk (don’t forget a chalk outline of a body) or make luminaries out of coated paper bags (that won’t catch on fire easily). Cut out faces and other shapes on the paper, then put votives in holders in the bags and light them, lining the way to your door with a cool, creepy glow.
There’s really almost no limit to the different things you can do to celebrate and decorate for Halloween. And every year you can save your crafts (and stock up on new toys at the day after sale) and try more new things the next year. Halloween is a great holiday for bringing the spirit of fun to people of all ages, so have fun with your holiday crafts.
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