H Week- Homemade Halloween Decorations

With Halloween quickly approaching, I have been working on some easy and cheap homemade decorations. Last year, I made these milk jug pumpkins. They are super simple and fun. I just painted milk jugs with orange acrylic paint. Once the orange was dry, I painted the tops brown and added faces to some of them with black paint. Next, I put some dry pasta in each one to weigh them down. Beans, popcorn kernels, sand, as well as nuts, bolts, or washers are some of the many other things that would serve the same purpose. I then pushed Christmas lights into each jug. A strand of one hundred lights filled two to three pumpkins effectively. They are nice displayed in the childhood wagon that my sister and I shared.

Trip has a hard time leaving them alone!

They look cooler and cooler as it gets darker.

Another project from last year was a welcome sign for the door. I cut strips of Halloween scrapbook paper, taped them together, and added tagboard letters.

This year brought a couple of new projects. First, I made a bunting for our kitchen/dining room shelves. I used the same paper from the welcome sign and cut out a bunch of rhombuses. I then folded each one in half around some ribbon and added a piece of double-sided tape to hold everything in place.

A few days ago, I saw a tutorial for trash bag spider webs on How About Orange and was sold. We have tons of spiders around here right now (much to everyone's dismay), so it seemed appropriate. In fact, we have so many spider webs forming outside the house, that we don't even have to add any fake ones for Halloween. Yuck!

Anyway, I got out some bags and got to work cutting.

I ended up with three good spider webs and arranged them on our large sliding glass door that faces the street.

Apparently they were nice enough that a real spider took refuge near one of them. The only reason it survived was because it was outside!

When the sun shines through the window in the morning, the spider web shadows show up on the blinds inside. At night, they look great from the street with the light coming from inside the house.