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Low-Cost Halloween Decorating Ideas for
Fun
By Jeanette Joy Fisher
Halloween is a uniquely special time of year, regardless of whether
you're a kid or just a kid at heart. It's a holiday time that offers
lots of wonderful opportunities to decorate your home creatively, since
the subject matter is different from any other holiday. If you're
thinking about decorating your porch and yard for the spookiest night of
the year, you can do it without having to spend a lot of money. Here are
a few low-cost ideas for showing your Halloween
spirit to the world:
Crime Scene to Fright Scene
You can get rolls of yellow Caution tape (the type you see at crime
or disaster scenes to keep people out of certain areas) fairly
inexpensively at most hardware stores, and if you put it up around the
perimeter of your yard, accompanied by a sign that says something like
"Fright Scene: Enter at Your Own Risk," it can give an eerily
spooky ambience while also offering guests a wary smile.
You can enhance that spookiness either more by replacing your regular
porch light with a black light bulb. Adding a few Halloween-oriented
items like skulls and ghost figures that glow in the dark will be even
more effective.
Pumpkins and Paint Fun
If you want your pumpkins to last longer (and even to be reusable
when you scrap your Halloween decorations and begin decorating for
Thanksgiving), don't carve them. Paint them with acrylic paint. You can
create an infinite variety of faces or scenes, and your pumpkins will
last much longer. There's also none of the mess involved with carving
them. Place your pumpkins in groups of three to five of varying sizes
and shapes. It makes for a much more effective display.
Graveyard Fun
A little paint can go a long way in creating great-looking
tombstones, too. You can paint simple boards gray and then use black
paint to add silly or scary epitaphs that will delight visitors. Things
like: "See? I Told You I Was Sick" can bring smiles, but you
can also create scarier epitaphs to bring out the more ghoulish side of
your nature.
Craft Fun for Children
Children love this craft. You can create some wonderfully spooky
scenes in your windows by cutting out silhouettes of the various
Halloween icons, such as black cats, witches, and skeletons, out of
construction paper. When it gets dark, your windows will take on a
lovely macabre look when the light is blocked out by those eerie
objects.
Simple scarecrow-type figures, topped with rubber
Halloween masks,
can also be effective in adding some scare factor to your front porch
and lawn. Just stuff a shirt and pair of pants with straw or leaves, add
the mask, and you've got an instant horror figure for just a little
time, imagination, and very little money.
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