Halloween fun!

   Yay! It's Halloween time! I absolutely love this time of year.  Even though I'm all grown up now and supposedly too old to trick-or-treat (boo!), Halloween has continued to be one of my favorite holidays.  I love it because of all the fun ways to decorate, from ghoulish and ghastly to fun and whimsy, and also because I love to dress up and see all the little kiddos in their costumes.  This year will be especially fun for me 'cause I now have a kiddo of my own that I get to dress up for her first Halloween! She even has two costumes: a duck and a bumblebee... I just couldn't resist!

   So for the past four years or so I've tried to increase my collection of Halloween decor so that I can one day have an awesome decked-out Halloween house.  I could spend hours in the Halloween aisle just looking at all the fun things, but I usually only end up with a few new items due to our budget (that's it... next year I'm making a Halloween fund!!).  This year, however, our budget was especially tight so instead I thought I'd try my hand at creating some things of my own using inexpensive materials and stuff that I already owned.  I searched around for inspiration and found a couple of fun things to make and I'm really excited and proud of the cute new additions to my Halloween collection this year.

   

   So these guys here were my first project. I got the inspiration for this idea while scanning through Pinterest (my new favorite website!)  When I first saw them I immediately fell in love and wanted to make them for my own (here's the link to the original).  They were super easy to make and at least for me, nearly free!

So here's what I did:

-I took an old 1x4 baseboard that we just had lying around in the garage and cut it up into 4 pieces (not sure of the sizes, just whatever looked good).  The original used 2x4's.

-Then I grabbed some cheap craft paint at Joann's (I think I spent a total of $1.50).  Sure, the paint was cheap and it took a couple of coats, but for the price I wasn't complaining!  I handpainted each of the characters.

-For the mummy, I only painted a small black strip and yellow eyes and just covered the rest with some tan scraps of fabric.  To create the distressed look I simply ripped the fabric into strips instead of cutting it. Then I hot-glued the strips to the back using just a dab of glue on each end.

-For the base, I used a 2x4 that I again just had lying around, and painted it black.  I then used some small wood letters that I found at Michaels ($3.00 for a package of letters) to spell out trick-or-treat. I painted those orange and then glued them onto the front.

-To assemble the whole thing together I drilled some screws up from the bottom of the base into the characters.  You may be able to just use some glue, but I wanted to make sure they were really secure.

-Viola! My super cute Halloween sign that now sits proudly on my front porch.  So easy to make, and because of some random stuff I just had lying around, it only cost me $4.50!

   I've never really been a super crafty person, but I enjoyed doing these things so much that it has kinda jumpstarted me into some creative kick.  Now I'm planning on doing crafts more often, hence my new blog.  I also thought of how much fun it would be to do a new craft for each holiday, especially now that I have a little one, it seems like such a great mother-daughter thing to do.  So here's to hoping that this is just the first of many things to come!

-p.s. I don't have pictures of the creative process 'cause I decided to blog about them after I had already made them.  Next time I'll be sure to post photos with the instructions!