Homemade Halloween Decorations
March 31st, 2009
Holiday decorations become more popular with more people every year. Not just Christmas, mind you, but holidays of all kinds! Halloween is a personal favorite of mine. Decorations for Halloween can be creepy and kooky, spooky or just plain friendly. One thing remains a constant, though. Decorating for Halloween is great fun for all. It has to be done quickly, though. Halloween is a one-day event, so you usually put your decorations in your yard just the day before, then bring them in the next day. That’s why you want them to be as impressive as possible!
Of course, money is tight all over, but decorating for Halloween can be an inexpensive affair. You can always use homemade decorations. Of course, they won’t look exactly like everyone else’s, but that’s part of the fun. Your own creations will be better than those in the stores just because they are your original designs.
If that’s not enough to convince you, here are…
Five good reasons for creating your own, original Halloween decorations:
- Have a look at all business.com, and you will see that most people spent at least $60 on Halloween decorations in 2006. Of course, that was a while ago. What with party decorations, favors, treats, costumes and so on, it would be easy to spend between a hundred and two hundred dollars on these temporary items. The way the economy is these days, it is highly likely you have better things to do with your money. But still, you want to decorate your yard for Halloween. It’s fun for you and your friends and neighbors.
- Creating your own Halloween decorations is family fun. You could make all the decorations for your own Halloween party and feel a great deal of pride in your family’s accomplishment when your guests tell you how impressive they are.
- Surely, you can scare and disgust your friends and neighbors better with custom decorations than with any mass produced item you would buy in the store. After all, you know who you are dealing with and just what will scare them and gross them out! Whether it’s gigantic garbage bag tarantulas, bloody sheet curtains, or enormous spider eggs made from Paper Mache, you will know just what to create to have the greatest effect on your guests!
- Besides that, you want to save your money to buy candy and come up with the most impressive costumes.
- Your family will have lots of fun decorating your home together. This is quality family time that you will all remember and talk about for years to come.
Halloween Decoration ideas
You can get some Styrofoam, some granite paint (or just plain gray if you want to go cheaper) and some black markers. Then all you have to do is cut out the Styrofoam in tombstone shapes, spray paint it, wait for it to dry and fill in all the gory details with your black marker. Get some hay and pile it up to make "graves" and set a tombstone at the head of each. You can make an arm reaching from the grave by filling a surgical glove with gelatin (just use the jigglers recipe you can find on the box). Attach the "hand" to the end of an empty shirt-sleeve, and then bury the other end of the sleeve in the hay around your tombstones. Instant re-animated corpse! Throw around a little fake blood, and the effect is complete. If you really want to get fancy, you can buy prepackaged spider web to string around and throw a few fake spiders in it. Dry ice gives a nice, creepy fog effect. Play some spooky music and be sure to get yourself a cauldron to serve your candy.
Or, you could go with "friendly" if "creepy" doesn’t suit you. You can have Casper instead of corpses and happy face ghosts instead of fiendish faces. To make happy face ghosts, you just need white balloons filled with helium. You will tie them off with invisible fishing line. For each balloon, draw a happy face on a white garbage bag. Put the garbage bag over the white balloon, and voila! Now you have a happy face ghost that will appear to float and fly freely in the breeze. You could also make a "totem pole" by impaling pumpkins with a length of PVC pipe. Once you have gotten a good stack of them, draw or paint happy faces of various types on them. Be sure to leave a few inches of pipe free to push into the ground. This will hold your totem pole in place.
There are lots of great Halloween decoration ideas out there. Surf the net! Get a good craft book! Watch lots of scary movies to get great ideas! Then just let your imagination go wild! Create your own Halloween extravaganza. You, your family, friends and neighbors will be sure to remember your efforts with pleasure!