Halloweenitis: Making Halloween Decor For Free or Under $5

 

These look cool, especially if the bottles or vases have water in them and food coloring to make the stick less obvious to view. Be sure the doll heads have no eyes.

Ever since I was a kid growing up on an estate that had 2 cottages, stables, and a barn, I learned to sort through paraphenalia stored away and find ways to make something new out of something old. 

Halloween is a great time for this. You can use a simple wheelbarrow filled with ice to hold beer bottles and soda bottles for a party.

A 50-cent plastic pumpkin from Goodwill (or a dollar store) is great to cover a porchlight by cutting the back out so you can wrap it around, or consider using a plastic Halloween mask with eye holes. 

This creepy tree face is the root from a bush that died off. I put some air-drying clay over the area where the face would be and then poked eye and mouth holes in it, let it dry, then painted it to blend in with the rooth.

This Jack O'Lantern head guy was some sticks I tied together and glued with twine then used air-drying clay to to make the head and painted it. 

stockings with a ballon with a glow stick inside and water. 

Empty water or milk jugs with glow-in-the-dark paint poured inside and stickers that show radioactive.

Spider cubes - fill just the bottom of ice cube tray and freeze, then put a spider on top of the ice and cover with water and freeze again.

A cheap bag of rubber cockroaches and some two-sided tape.

Blair Witch stick symbols and corn dollies made from corn husks - those pagan-looking symbols get folks every time.

The same goes for dried apple heads (peel, soak in lemon juice with lots of salt, then after 15 minutes, carve a face with exaggerated features as when it dries they wrinkle up. Then, soak another hour in the solution. Let sit out and dry up until Halloween.

The most creepy things are found around the house. One year, I took all that Amazon cardboard and cut out wood planks and painted them to look like wood, crisscrossed them over the windows to look abandoned. Another year, I cut out a tree with a cat and painted it black, put it in the picture window with a blue light bulb in a lamp behind it.

There's something about handmade masks and decorations that looks so Old World, Pagan, Rural, and gives it a lot more spook than any mass manufactured plastic. 

🎃🎃🎃

Enjoy - for less!