I'm not one of those people who love Halloween. It definitely is a holiday that is more fun now that we have children but I feel like this is the first year that I've actually given it much thought outside of "what are the boys going to dress up as for Halloween?" But somehow this year when October rolled around I kept thinking about making Halloween decorations. Not the gory and spooky kind but something cute and simple. And of course my boys were totally on board with the idea since they love any type of decoration.
The "Happy Halloween" banner is made out of black card stock and black and white bakers twine.
One of my favorite decorations is this Halloween branch. We painted a branch with white acrylic paint and added paper pumpkins, orange and black paper flowers, bats, leaves and some spider webs.
This spider web is a placemat I found at Ikea and thought would make a great spider web. We painted it white and backed it with white card stock. I would have omitted the white card stock but I was trying to hide the outlet we have above our mantle. The boys punched out a bunch of black paper spiders using a Martha Stewart paper punch and we tucked some of the legs into the web to secure them in place. I then hung the web from the ceiling using monofilament and a thumbtack.
I've been making paper globes for years and I never get tired of them. I saw the pumpkin paper globe idea years ago in Martha Stewart Kids and I finally got around to making them. I added a little green cardstock stem and was so happy to find perfectly matching green brads at our local paper store.
When I saw the cute orange + white zigzag glitter scrapbook paper I knew I wanted to use it for paper bunting. Bunting is so easy and fun to make.
Although I generally steer clear of foam stickers the boys picked out some cute Halloween glitter foam stickers at our local paper shop. I cut up some black and white card stock and the boys put the stickers on the front and back of the cards. I then sewed the cards together and hung them from the ceiling. The boys also had fun punching out dozens of little black paper bats using another Martha Stewart punch. We placed a few on a white linen covered pin board and the rest on a mini paper lantern garland.
Since I wanted to be able to reuse the lanterns we used little foam squares to adhere the bats since they can easily be removed.
I have a thing for mobiles and I knew I wanted to make a few Halloween mobiles. J found a pack of Halloween die cuts on sale at Michaels so we used the skulls + bones and some monofilament and hung them from a painted embroidery hoop. We also used the web + spider die cuts in another mobile. The boys punched out black + white paper circles and I sewed them together.
Lastly we hung a few die-cut spider webs and paper spiders in the window on our front door.
And now that we have a nice set of Halloween decorations I think we'll host a little Halloween party next year!