The night’s drawing in, and there’s a chill in the air. Halloween is here! This year, use your creativity to make your own Halloween decorations and turn your house into a thrilling, chilling experience for the whole family.
1. Pumpkin lanterns
They’re the classic Halloween decorations. To make hollowed-out pumpkin lanterns, cut off the tops of your pumpkins and scoop out the flesh inside, then use a sharp knife to cut holes in the skins for eyes and mouths. Or keep the pumpkins intact and use a linoleum cutter to etch faces or patterns in the outer layer of pumpkin skin.
2. Ghosts and ghouls
- Paint a butternut squash or a pumpkin white, then draw or paint on some scary black eyes.
- Empty tin cans also make very good ghosts.
- Paint the cans white, turn them upside down and draw on some ghostly black eyes.
- Attach lengths of white wool or string so that they dangle from the bottoms of the cans to make floating ghostly bodies, then hang the cans from tree branches to scare your neighbours.
- For a final touch, make up some ghost lollipops to hand out to visitors by wrapping white tissue paper over the lollipop heads and drawing or painting on a pair of spooky eyes.
3. Spooky lanterns
Fill empty jam jars with black sand, then push a battery-operated candle into each pot so that it stands up securely in the sand. Please put them in your windows or dot them around the garden for some creepy chills.
4. Bat branches
Collect bare twigs or branches from your garden. Next, cut out bat-shaped silhouettes from black card and attach them all over the branches. Arrange the components in a vase to make a striking spooky table centrepiece or decoration.
5. Scary spiders
Gather a pile of conkers and add some googly eyes and pipe cleaner legs to turn them into spiders. Hide them around the house to frighten your family, or hang them from window frames.
6. Pumpkin party bags
Take a few sheets of orange tissue paper and cut into squares around 30cm x 30cm (12in x 12in). Scrunch up some newspaper into a ball and mould your tissue paper squares around this to make a round pumpkin shape. Use a couple of layers of tissue paper to give your bag some strength. Remove the newspaper ball and fill the tissue paper bag with M&Ms or other small sweets. And finally, twist the top of the bag and wrap it in green tape to make a stem for your pumpkin.
7. Pine cone decorations
For a break from the scary stuff, paint pine cones in the colours of autumn – glowing orange, golden yellow and vivid red – and use them to decorate wreaths or fill bowls.
