Monday, November 3, 2014

Creepy Crafts

I went all-out for a Halloween party this year (and by 'this year' I mean, I forgot to hit "publish" two years ago).  Unfortunately, my camera was not quite up to the task of capturing the mood lighting and creepy effects.  But this will at least give an idea of what I did and hopefully provide a little spark of inspiration to anyone who wants to plan their own Halloween party.


First up - drink labels, I found some of these online and printed them out - but most of them I made up using good old MS Word.   I tea-died the paper - drying it in a warm oven, then covered the original labels with black crepe paper.  I think they turned out well.


All the liquor






Crystal ball - found a light-bulb globe and a tiny glittered tea-light holder at Goodwill.  I added a bit of glitter pain to the globe and set it in the holder.  The "book of visions" was more tea-dyed paper, burn around the edges (actually - I think that's paper from a shopping bag on the cover, tea-dyed pages inside).  The idea was that people would "gaze into the crystal ball" and write predictions in the book.  The idea was a bit better than the execution - but a few people did write it in, which was fun.

Part of the problem with these pictures is that with the flash -  you miss the effect of the mood lighting, but without the flash - it all looks blurry.  Hopefully- you get the general idea.  Cobwebs and tattered fabric over pretty much everything.








The white bouquet had creepy crawly bugs in it, but I'm not sure anyone noticed.    


I have a handful of old pictures of my family, I printed them out in black and white and they ended up looking really spooky actually - just by being low-res.  





These were fun - I made the jack-o-lantern ones last year, and the mummy ones are new.  The mummies use tissue paper and cheese-cloth.






On the alter to the right I had 'fortune-candies' - copied a bunch of spooky fortunes and wrapped them around Hersey's minis.  It was fun to have people read their fortunes out.  But I did too many!!  I'll be eating fortune candies for months.  

How the crystal ball looked with candles.  







The pictures in the back were all cut-outs in black glued over book pages.  I think it worked really well.