With Halloween fast approaching now is a good time to dig out all the crafty bits and pieces from google eyes to pipe cleaners and have fun making your own DIY Halloween decorations and crafts. This was and still is, one of my kids favourite times of the year and we have made countless party invitations over the years using tiny feet as ghosts and messy hands as spiders, all of which are now safely tucked into mums treasure box.
Here we’ve given you some great spooktacular ideas for arts and crafts for decorations around the house and a bonus is they will keep the kids occupied for hours! Watch out for the edible version next week!
Ghostly Footprints
Use your child’s feet to make ghosts and a super cute Halloween ‘trick or treat smell my feet sign.’ We used a blank 8×10 canvas and then painted it orange with craft paint. For the text we designed a stencil with the Cricut machine and used a black paint maker. Use non toxic white craft paint for the feet and a black marker for the ghost eyes and mouth. These also make great halloween invitations and you can print the feet onto black card and then draw on bats or stars for additional effect.
Hand-print Spider Cards
These cute hand print spiders make great party invitations, name cards or even spooky menu cards for dinner. All you need is orange card or coloured paper, black paint, white marker or paint pen and googly eyes. When you paint the hands remember not to paint the thumbs so you just get the 4 legs either side! You can then either draw the web onto the card or if you want to be really creative you could create one with black wool. Add your googly eyes and either a smile or a look of surprise!
Haunted House
My kids used to love making their own haunted house and one year we even cut out 31 small doors and made it into a halloween count-down calendar. This project from colouring home even has a really handy template for the house that you can cut out and decorate. Kids can fill the windows with spooky characters or halloween stickers and if you’r feeling very adventurous you could make small windows that open in the style of an advent calendar. A nice idea is to add a small message behind each window for the kids to open, giving them things to do in the build up to halloween.
Mummy Lights
These fun-tastic mummy lights are always a huge hit with the kids and are super easy to make. All you need are some glass jars or vases, some gauze bandages and googly eyes. Just wrap the bandages around the jars fixing it in place with tape and stick on your googly eyes to make your mummy. Pop in a small plastic flame candle and the kids can keep these alight in their rooms all night.
Paint a Pumpkin
One of the hardest and most expensive things to find in Bangkok is the elusive giant pumpkin, ironically the pumpkin patches are all ready around December long after the spooky season is finished! You can order the large pumpkins through Villa market and other farm suppliers but be warned they come with a heavy pricy tag. Good alternatives are water melons, which are both easy to cut and can either be left to look like green monsters or painted orange to resemble a more traditional jack-o-lantern. The good news is the kids can eat the insides whilst having fun creating different shaped faces for Mum or Dad to cut out.
We picked our top 5 craft ideas for kids but there are many websites and videos showing some really creative and elaborate projects to make – to the more simple ideas that kids can make on their own.
Happy Haunting!
