Creepy Portrait Wall

This year I decided to go all out on the interior of my house for Halloween. I saw an idea on Pinterest for a creepy type of photo wall and wanted to try it out. It was really easy to recreate and you can put a lot of your own touches on it.

All you need are picture frames, even ones you already own, and the time and energy to search out Pinterest or the internet for photos that fit your theme. In my case, half the frames I owned and the other half I got at thrift stores. I probably spent $5.00 total for frames. I used push pins to hang all the frames as they were lightweight. 

As you can see above, and throughout the other pictures, I'm really into witches this year. I liked this picture above and the fact that it printed with a black boarder. I decided to use a dark red scrapbook paper for the background and put it in a larger black frame. It helped give the overall look of the wall a "darker" feel.

Above are some of the frames I used and a closeup of some of the pictures. Check out those twins! They get me every single time I see them! Just loving sisters right? Or something out of The Shining!?

The above picture is my absolute favorite! As many of you may recall, my love of Halloween comes mostly from my Gran Mac. Unfortunately she passed away this spring and so the witches are a tribute to her. She absolutely loved the Wizard of Oz and the Wicked Witch of the West was her favorite character. The photo itself just seemed like something she would really love.

The cool thing about this frame is that I bought it as-is with no glass so it was really lightweight. I just loved all the different layers and colors of the frame. It was perfect for putting a green background to compliment the black and white photo.

Above is the finished project. I will note that the painting of the girl in white to the left was a $10 picker find that seemed so fitting I just had to have it! You will also see that I put a few "scenic" pictures in there for effect, including the outside of the WDW Haunted Mansion on opening day. And if you look really close you might see a few Grim Grinning Ghosts! It's a little hard to take a quality picture of the overall look, but trust me when I say it's amazing in person.

Next up I will get more into the detailed touches of what makes this a WDW Haunted Mansion theme. All I'll say is be prepared for a whole lot of Leota! Stay tuned to see what's in store....

Creepy Eyes Wallpaper

After a very long time away from blogging, I'm back, and just in time for Halloween!! I've been crafting during the hiatus, I just haven't been sharing it on the blog as we've been a very busy family this year.

I'm not surprised that I had an urge to blog again right around the time I started thinking up ideas for Halloween. As I've mentioned before it is my absolute favorite holiday!

This year the inspiration for my interior decorations is coming from the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion ride. I have a LOT to share with you over the next few blog posts, but I figured I'd kick it off with a simple and very cost effective craft I call "creepy eyes wallpaper".

Note: I did this by myself within 15 minutes but it is a very kid friendly craft if you have little helpers!

For those looking to recreate this craft you'll be happy to know it cost me a total of $4.50. I got the black tablecloth for $1.50 at Dollar General and the creepy eyes for $2.99 at Michael's. Other supplies you will need include scissors, tape, and a stapler, but you should already have that on hand.

After taking the tablecloth out of it's packaging I hung it on the door and found a crease to cut it from to size it right. Make sure you have extra tablecloth on the sides and the top so you can wrap it around the door frame. The only part you'll want to be cut accurately is the bottom as you won't be wrapping that under. As you'll see in the picture above, I had enough excess tablecloth that i could roll it and staple it on the top corner. This will help keep the tablecloth from sagging. You want it as tight to the door as possible.

You'll also want to make sure you pull it tight around the hinges so that you are able to open and close the door without the tablecloth ripping. For the doorknobs, cut a small hole in the tablecloth and push the doorknob through. Don't forget to also cut a hole for the door jam as well so the door will function properly.

After you are finished taping the tablecloth to the back of the door you can begin to apply your sticker eyes. I found the pack I bought at Michael's had a nice adhesive so I'm not worried at all that the stickers will fall off. On the other hand I was able to gently peel them off and move them if I needed to, although I don't recommend doing that too many times.

Above is the finished product! I hope you like what I created.

I think it's important to point out that the reason I call this a "creepy eyes wallpaper" is because you could easily do this on any wall of your home. I chose to do it on this pantry door because the area I am decorating is my kitchen and I was running out of wall space.... which means next up is a wall of creepy photos you won't want to miss!

Creepy Science Lab - Halloween Party

I know Halloween is over, but i just HAD to share this blog with you even if it is late. I did promise you in my last blog post about the DIY Fake Blood - Tablecloth Decoration that I would follow up with other Halloween decor I was working on. The friend who offered their home up for the Halloween party really wanted to have a Creepy Science Lab theme.

The first part of this blog I will talk about some of the DIY stuff I put together to match her theme. The second part of the blog will show how the overall theme turned out when everything was put in place. (Please note that the lab stuff was borrowed and so i can only share with you the cost of things I helped to make.)

This first one was really easy and cheap. You will need mason jars, yellow food coloring, and rubber bats, rodents, spiders or whatever other creepy realistic rodents/pests you can find. Rubber rodents are $1 a piece, Mason jars $1 to $2, food coloring is around $3 and so it should cost about $10 to make 3 "mad scientist jars".

We left the rat alone in one jar. His beady red eyes looked awesome in the yellow water. The other jars we cut off the bats wings and put each wing and the body in separate jars. You just drop in around 10 drops of yellow food coloring and fill the jar with water.

Tip: A lot of sauces you buy at the store come in mason jars. Peel off the labels and reuse them for these kinds of projects.

Ripped up black curtains help set the mood for the room, which of course is always "dark and creepy" when it comes to Halloween. We took old curtains and shredded them using scissors. (If you don't have any black curtains lying around I suggest checking out your local thrift store.) In the above picture I'm showing you how to create realistic wear and tear on "50 years left behind" curtains. 

One method is to twist a piece of the curtain with your fingers, then cut a chunk of that off and that will make a jagged hole in the curtain. Another way is to get a pair of scissors (preferably dull blades) and instead of cutting straight, pull down tight on the curtain and rip up with scissors. This makes it so that your tears and cuts aren't all in a straight line.

We really scored when we found these mirrored wall candle holders at the thrift store. I believe we paid $1 a piece for these and $.20 a candle. We took black Plasti Dip ($10 a can) and sprayed that over it to get our desired look. The bonus on Plasti Dip is it peels off if you want your item to go back to the way it originally looked. We taped the mirrors before we sprayed them to get a clean look.

Well that about sums up the DIY projects I worked on for this party. I will point out things in the pictures below that we were able to find at a cheap price. Again the lab stuff is real and was on loan :)

Thrift store items: gold tray $1, candle holders $1 each, gray metal box $2, gray yarn $1 (and seriously what a cool "dust" effect that made)

Loved the use of the electronic tea candles. You can get a 12 pack of these on Amazon for around $10. Great thing is you can use them for many other events too.

There are some real brains and some fake brains in this picture above :)

Bought those pop up paper wall spiders you see above for $2 at Michaels. It was on clearance right before Halloween and was Martha Steward brand. The sconce was $2 at the thrift store.

Gold candle holder was $1 thrift store find. The light and cabinet above are covered in "creepy cloth" and bought at the Dollar Tree. Hard to tell from the picture but the purple light bulb was a cool effect in person.

Our guests even made "creepy" snacks and bought wines that had Halloween fitting names. It was a great night out and we had a lot of fun with this party.

DIY Fake Blood - Tablecloth Decoration

I'm helping a few friends decorate for a Halloween party and I couldn't wait to share the results of this project!! Let's call it a "sneak preview" because we have plenty of other great things we made I will blog about shortly. I've personally never tried to make fake blood and wasn't sure how this would turn out. I will happily admit it worked better than expected (with a little trial and error) and that I had SO much fun unleashing my inner Dexter! ( lol )

Now I will admit that there are plenty of "fake blood recipes" out there if you just Google them, but I decided to wing it with what I already had in the house. If you are a by the book type of person you might want to do a little research to see what recipe works best for you.

I started off with 2 cups of water and added some corn starch for thickening. My lesson here is that it didn't really do much. (So honestly you can probably skip the corn starch.) Also, when I put about 40 drops of red food coloring it only really turned the water a dark pinkish color. I didn't want to use up all my food coloring so I started adding chocolate syrup and cocoa powder until I got the color I wanted. It wasn't really that much, maybe 2 tablespoons of each.

My BIG TIP here from trial and error is to start off with less water! That way you don't have to mix in as much of the other ingredients. I will say that having 2 cups was helpful to me though since i decided to decorate the tablecloth with my hand. More on that below...

I considered using gloves and realized it wouldn't get me the desired effect I wanted. I just had to see what my hand print was going to look like because I was dying of curiosity. I also knew that it would reveal to me if the mixture i created was dark enough in color to truly show on the material. As you can see above it worked out well. (Note: I call this a tablecloth because that is what I'm using it for to decorate. It is actually a long white window sheer curtain.)

Now my next technique idea was discovered because of the fact that when i pulled my hand off the material my finger tips dripped the excess onto the tablecloth. I immediately thought, wow that looks like pretty authentic blood spatter, and no that doesn't make me crazy it just proves I've watched every episode of Dexter (some twice)!

So then I decided to take a page right out of the Dexter book and flick my fingertips outward. (If you haven't seen the show, he often recreates the blood spatter of crime scenes by throwing fake blood to see the velocity and trajectory.) The result was really awesome and seriously fun! See for yourself below...

A few other things I decided to do was write "help me" and take my hand and drag it across the material to make a smeared pattern. I let it dry for 15 minutes and then threw it in the dryer for another 15 minutes. The material seems to be holding the color. I do wonder though if it wouldn't just wash right out if I sent it through on a soak cycle. However, I advise that whatever you decided to decorate with fake blood that it not be something important in case the staining is permanent.

Halloween Card & Treat Bags

Crafty Kid and I made two different Halloween projects a few weekends ago. The first was a card. 

We took a blank white card and stamped it with some dancing skeletons. The bottom of one stamp had a spider and the top of one had a cat, so we inked only that part to get the desired look. Then we took scrapbooking paper and cut out parts so you could see the stamps poking out. After we glued down the paper we placed the spooky stamp on top. (See below)

The second craft was making treat bags. You can pick up plain bags at any local craft store and there are many great ways to decorate them. Below are just a few examples of what we did.

The bag above we decided to make the skeletons "dance" up steps.

This second bag we put a ghost on one side and a cat stamp on the other.

To get the desired look we put black ink on a Q-tip and smeared it around.

You can start off with light strokes and press harder to make it darker.

The third bag we used the Spooky stamp.

We cut out a border with the scrapbook paper and glued it on.

Below are the finished products.

As you can see, it only takes a few crafting tools to make lots of different designs.

If you try this project at home let us know how it turns out!

Halloween and Fall Decor: Philadelphia and South Jersey

I went home to visit my family in Philadelphia and South Jersey this past week. I couldn't help but be impressed by all of the decorating that happens for the Halloween and Fall season. I don't tend to see as many people decorating their homes in West Virginia, which is a bummer. I took a bunch of pictures to share all the cool stuff I saw and hopefully it will give you some ideas for your own home decor. 

The pics below are from storefronts in Haddonfield, NJ. Also, my friend happened to have a very accurate fake skull for schooling purposes and I found it very festive!

It's a jolly holiday with Mary...

So we've already talked about my love of Halloween, so it should be no surprise that I go all out with my costumes!

So who I am being this year is someone I've loved since I was a kid... Mary Poppins! Now anyone who knows me well knows I'm a BIG Disney fan. And Mary Poppins, my friends, was the start of my Disney experience.

It was the first Disney music I was exposed to as my Mom used to play the record for me when I was a toddler. She said I'd dance around to it for hours, so it's no wonder that this story has stuck with me all these years. I even took my family to see the traveling Broadway production of it in Philadelphia a few years ago and cried like a baby at the end! (Mostly cause she flies away with her umbrella! So cool to see live... a real flying Mary Poppins! Ahhh, I'll never grow up.)

Now I've been other Disney characters in previous years, including Snow White and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan. Mary, however, has been on mind for a long time and I just couldn't wrap my head around how to pull her costume off. That was until my friends and I did a clothing swap this Spring and I found the perfect Mary skirt! It was off to the races at that point as I knew the rest would be easy to put together if I set my mind to it.


So here in this post I'm going to show you how I made my Mary Poppins hat....

Luckily for me I already had a black bowler hat from a previous costume when I was a clown. The first step was to get rid of the rainbow strip on the original hat and replace it with a black strip of ribbon. Two reasons using the black ribbon works out really well for me:

1) The black ribbon covered the glue that was left behind from the original strip of ribbon.

2) I glued all the remaining pieces needed for the hat onto the ribbon. If I ever want to use

this hat again for something else it will be easy to take off and start again.

 

 

Below you will see the fake flowers and berries I picked up at my local Michaels. (Lucky for me Christmas stuff is out already so I didn't have any issues finding the berries. On the flip side, they didn't have any daisy flowers so I had to create my own.) 

 

I carefully removed the flowers from their stems and used scissors to cut the berries off. Notice I left the stems of the berries long so that I would have an easier time arranging them before gluing them on.

 



 

 

I chose to stack the petals to give the flower more depth. I learned from the first flower I did that the best way to achieve the look I was going for was to hot glue the center of the first petal to the ribbon. I then hot glued the center of a second petal on top of the first petal.

Now I could position the berry where I wanted it and hot glue it, making sure to press down on the petals and seal the berry stem between the ribbon and the petal. Once it dried I put a third white petal hot glued in the center to cover up the hot glue marks on the petals below.

Final touch was to the small yellow center flowers. Again, I stacked two yellow flowers to give it more depth.

 

 

 

Now the clown hat had come with a flower sticking out of the side. This was amusing to me as you might have already noticed from the picture I posted above of Julie Andrews, that Mary Poppins also had a flower coming off the one side of her hat. I didn't think the original flower worked so I altered it to make it a white flower with a yellow center.

 

 

 

So that is how I turned my cheap clown costume hat into a pretty decent replica of Mary Poppins hat. I can't wait to share the final look of my costume! Only 3 weeks until Halloween.... stay tuned for pictures :) 

 

 



Halloween Window Decorating - 2014

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I have so many fond memories surrounding the 31st day of October. When I was a kid we would visit my Grandma Mac (mom's mom) every year dressed up in our costumes, and with me having younger sisters I did it well beyond the appropriate tricker-treating age. (My last year out I was 21 and dressed as Paul Stanley from Kiss.)

Grandma Mac used to decorate her house in grand fashion, give us extra treats for stopping by, and every year she answered the door dressed as a witch. She tried to convince us she was a witch every day of the year, and that she only showed us the hat and broom on Halloween. (I honestly thought if I waited up long enough if I'd see her fly past the moon. Probably until I was at least 12.)

My mom continued Grandma Mac's tradition and decorated my childhood house for every holiday, including usually forgotten ones like Thanksgiving and Easter. Although, in my opinion, her showmanship was best at Christmas and Halloween. So as soon as I bought my own house I couldn't wait to carry on the tradition of decorating for Halloween. Especially seeing Grandma Mac's health doesn't allow for crazy decorating or witch playing, and my Mom has found less time to do it herself as us kids have gotten older.

This project contains items bought at the local Family Dollar. I'm showing you what you can do to the outside front of your house for under $30. *(see note below)

Here are a few of the things I bought. Note they all say a dollar on them :) 

Tip: Car window clings seem to stick better and the colors are more vibrant.

If using windowing clings make sure you have access to the outside of your window. Most new windows fold down so you can clean the outside. The window clings only have one sticky side so in order for the image to show correctly you have to put it on the outside of the window. This also prevents any animals you have from being able to eat the decorations.

If you can't access the outsides of your windows then you can use a more traditional paper cutout like the ones above. These are ones I saved from last year. I like to save what I can each year in order to build up my collection and keep things cost effective.

When building the windows I like to have a theme in mind for each one. That helps me decide what decorations to pick and keeps it from looking cluttered. This is my Grandma Mac window :)

Here is my spider theme that you'll see I later added a skeleton grim reaper to below.

I like to decorate the top windows as well, and since those don't fold out, I used the paper cutouts.

I always have a door cover and this year I really liked the "Do Not Enter" as it matched nicely with my wooden signs and the caution tape I like putting on my garage door.

*Please note that I bought my wooden signs last year. They were around $10 each at my local CVS and I didn't include them in my cost of decorating this year.

AND NOW ONTO THE BIG REVEAL OF THE WHOLE HOUSE....

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Ta-da! 

Hope you enjoyed my Halloween decorating tips. 

Have yourself a Spooky day on October 31st!