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Tuesday, November 2, 2010

On the Day Before Halloween…

…our house was haunted with ghosts and was crawling with spiders.

I used one pack of glittery spiders from Wal-Mart to add a creepy effect around our house.  I put the spiders in our candles.  See below.

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As you can see in the photo below, I also used the spiders on our mantel.  The spiders were paired with bleeding candles.  The rest of the mantel decor consists of a ghost village I made in 2005 for our first Halloween as a married couple and a vase filled with orange berries and curling willow branches from my mother’s yard.  I spray painted the branches black.

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In this post, I will share how to make the ghost village.  It looks great with candles behind it.  The flame of the  candles gives the appearance of ghosts floating behind the doors and windows.

I got the idea from a magazine years ago (I can’t remember which one).  To make the village take four pieces of black construction paper and fold them in half.  Unfold the paper and use each half as a different house.  Use an X-Acto knife to carve out any shape of windows, doors, and roofs that you like.  It is hard to tell in the photos but some of mine even have shutters and doors.  Next, use a glue stick to adhere yellow tissue paper to the backs of each opening.  Embellish with cut-outs of ghosts and pumpkins.  When finished, fold each house slightly and place them next to each other.  Put flameless or regular candles behind the village to add a spooky appearance.  Store flat and reuse year after year.

ghostvillage

In keeping with our scary decor, I covered the wine bottles in our bar area with Halloween labels I printed from a website.  I printed the labels on regular printer paper and rolled tape behind each corner.  I gently stuck them over the existing labels on our bottles.  Hopefully, they will be easy to remove when we are ready to put our house back to normal.

Click here for the site with the labels.

Poison

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By our front door, I filled frames with vintage trick-or-treat photos I found online.  These pictures were also printed on regular paper. I plan to store them all in a file folder and reuse them next year too.

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In our guest bathroom, I used another one of Martha Stewart’s ideas.  Martha put a ghastly reflection in her mirror.  I thought it was too cute.  Once again, Martha’s way of doing things was too time consuming for me. 

Click here for Martha’s Ghost Directions.

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My ghost (shown below) took about 1 minute to create.  I used a white window chalk marker I already had that was left over from a sorority function years ago.  I just freehanded a ghost shape in our mirror leaving space for its eyes and mouth.

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Next, I added a few more accessories to create one scary bathroom.  :)

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This was another photo I found online.  I mounted this little witch over the artwork that is normally hanging in our bathroom.  She’s my favorite of the vintage looking pictures.

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Only one more Halloween post to go.  Whew.

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