October 30, 2014

Easy Quick Cheap Halloween Decor


Even if you have not put up any Halloween decor and are now wishing that you had, there is still time!
  Here are some very easy, quick and inexpensive ideas that
 you can get done before the trick-or-treaters come to your door.

My favorite Halloween decorating trick is to get a bag of the
synthetic spider webbing and some plastic spiders.

 When the artificial webbing comes out of the bag, it looks like pillow stuffing.

 The webbing goes such a long way if you take time to
 pull it thin (which, in my opinion) is how it looks best anyway.
Pull it even much thinner than this.

All you have to do is to pull it around things that you already
have in place either at your front door or even inside your house.

The plants in the urns by the front door at my house got spun
with spider webs and then the spiders even got busy 
extending their webs to the front porch lights.







It took about an hour's worth of time and $4 worth of webbing
and spiders (on sale) to give the front porch a spooky feel. 

It's hard to see the spider webs in this picture but when you are
up close to the porch in person it is a big difference. 
Have you ever walked into a spider web in the woods that
you couldn't see? Wow! I can do a week's worth of cardio
in that awful moment. 

The spiders also got inside my house too.  They wrapped
a pumpkin vignette with their webs.




Actually, I ran out of plastic spiders on the front porch.
To avoid another trip to the store and to save money, I made
some more out of black pipe cleaners that I had on hand to 
use on the inside spider webs.

Here's how I those "good-enough-if-you-don't-look-close" spiders:

The pipe cleaners I had were 12" long.
  I cut each one into four pieces which is 3" pieces.

1. Cross two pieces of cut pipe cleaner
2. Twist the two pieces together in the middle
3. Add another piece by also twisting it in the middle
4. Add the final piece by twisting

Sometimes the "legs" do not end up the same length due 
to the twisting.  Snip the ends of the legs off with scissors
so they will all be approximately the same length.

Separate the legs so that there are four legs on each side.
Bend the legs so they will look more spider-like.

The pipe cleaner spiders take about 2 minutes each to make 
and only cost about 1 cent apiece.

They also got into the foyer chandelier.

Another black Halloween symbol that is easy to decorate 
with are black birds which are only $1 at Dollar Tree (duh). 

You can just add them to your regular house decor to give 
a subtle and fun nod to Halloween.  Just take the cardboard 
off of their feet and use the wires (or not) coming out of
the bottoms of their feet to attach them to shelves or items. 

Here's how they look with the Fall decor that I already had up:
Living Room






Kitchen Table


This next project is practically free if you already have some 
empty bottles, jars, food coloring and a printer....faux 
hocus pocus apothecary containers. 

Soak then scrape the labels off of the bottles and/or jars. 

Paint the tops of the containers to make them look older.

There are lots of sites that offer free printable Halloween labels.
I liked these from Itsy Bitsy Fun because they are not gory.

You can print them directly off of the site without downloading.
See that blue bar at the bottom of the computer screen?
The symbol at the end of the bar is to print directly off of
the screen.  If you have a color printer, you can print the labels
with a sepia background. I printed mine on a black and white
laser printer to save and not use my color cartridges.

You can buy labels similar to these in most craft stores.
If you are printing out like me, you will need to cut them out.

I glued the labels onto the bottles and jars and then added
the water....I wasn't sure if the labels would need to lie flat
to dry.  I think it might have been better to add the water 
and then glue the labels so I wouldn't have to worry about
getting the labels wet while adding the water. 

After adding water to the bottles and jars add some food 
coloring.  Any kind seems to work fine to color the water. 

The coloring looks eerie as it drifts down into the bottles.

I added the bottles to a table display I had made a couple
of weeks ago Gourds In Glass.  The flowers in that centerpiece
had died so I replace them with the apothecary bottles.  These
apothecary bottles and jars would look very Halloween-ish
grouped together all by themselves even. 

The original centerpiece also had flowers in the vases at the 
ends of the display.  To replace those, I added dead cone flowers
in one vase and plastic greenery in the other one. 
Dead leaves were removed before adding to the vase. 


The water for the vases was also colored and apothecary tops
were placed on the vases.  If you just wanted to submerge real
 or fake flowers/greenery in regular vases with food-colored
 water, that would look good too. 


The vase that was on the middle pumpkin in the original
 display was was replaced with another pumpkin
  and a black owl from Michael's.
she looks like she only had one eye but really she has two...all the more Halloween-ish


bottles that are already a color don't have to have food coloring added...only water





At dusk I added some small candles to the display (and swapped
the end vases to even out the high/low items).


The main things I wanted to share was the spider webbing
 the black birds and the faux apothecary bottles and
jars for easy and quick Halloween decorating.

 Another fairly inexpensive item this year that was kind
of a recycle was the front door wreath.  

I know not everybody has a smashed deco mesh wreath, a large
fake skeleton and plastic critters just sitting in the carport but
I did.  I made the wreath last year for a friend in black and
gold but her husband put something heavy on it and it squished.
I made her a new one and she gave me the old one back. 


I had given away my Halloween wreath from last year so I 
needed something for this year.  The skeleton is from Walgreens...
he was $10 which is a pretty good price (I think) for a 3' skeleton.
I bought him not knowing what I was going to do with him but 
when I tried him on the smashed wreath, he fit fairly well.

The gold deco mesh was pulled off of the wreath form...

...and new orange deco mesh (left over from Easter decorations)
was secured on top of the flat deco mesh still on the wreath. 

The plastic orange spider and green snake from a neighborhood
yard sale were painted black to (hopefully) show up better.
The skeleton was tied onto the refurbished wreath with fishing line
(I like it because it is almost invisible) and the critters were
tied on to the skelton. 


Another mostly odds and ends wreath for the back door was
made from a grape vine wreath, left over spider webbing and
newly purchased "scary spiders" for $3 from Walgreen's.

Literally, only five minutes to put together and hang...
Spiders tied on to wreath with fishing line

Do you have any wreath elements lying around that you could
put together for a fun Halloween wreath? 

Have fun with these easy Halloween decorating ideas (if not 
this year, pin them to use next Halloween!)

I'm sharing this post over at 
French Country Cottage's Feathered Nest Friday
Craftberry Bush's The Inspiration Gallery
Shine Your Light's The Best of the Nest
Artsy Fartsy Mama's Artsy Fartsy Link Party
The Dedicated House's Anything Blue Friday
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