Add sinister messages to your Halloween brews. - Stefanie Gabrych Fraser
When decorating for a Halloween bash, limit the pumpkins, witches and ghosts this year. Instead unleash your inner Dr. Frankenstein.
Why not go totally over the top by adding visions of decaying bones and body parts as well as crawling bugs and a slew of flying creepy crawlies throughout the house? Here are a few cheap and macabre ideas for your Halloween evening festivities.
- What’s Up, Doc? Decorate your hallway, the backs of closet doors, or the washroom with blown-up medical charts illustrated with body parts and bones. Age the charts with damp tea bags and let dry before hanging.TIP: Find images in medical books such as Gray’s Anatomy online or look for it at the public library. Print out or photocopy the images you like and, for enlargements, head for a local print or photocopy shop.
- Bugged Out. Create large paper cut outs of flying insects or creepy spiders to suspend above the front door or entranceway. To make the spiders, glue black pipe cleaners as legs to black paper lanterns. Glue on yellow or orange circles for scary eyes. Hang from the ceiling with fishing wire. Add a few in dark corners for even more creepiness.
- Future Prospects. Give guests an inkling of future horrors. First cut out 5-cm circles of black card stock. Then fold and glue the circles into fortune cookie shapes. Insert a suitable warning message inside the "cookie." Leave a bunch in a bowl for guests to take home or pass them around during the evening festivities.
- Poisoned Brews. For a bit of colour, serve up soft drinks in empty plastic jugs or bottles labelled with sinister messages you can easily create on the computer.
- Treat Jugs. Again, label the jugs with wicked labels and then fill the jugs with jellybeans, gummy worms, or other treats to hand out as favours for guests to take home.
- Disturbing Dishes. Offer guests dishes or bowls full of appetizing goodies and then watch as they freak out when bugs and other frightening images begin to appear as the goodies are consumed. TIP: There are two ways to create your own stick-on decals to embellish serving dishes and bowls, or to create warning message labels. Photocopy images on clear acetate at a local photocopy or print shop and then trim around the photocopied image and use a bit of craft glue to stick the images to surfaces. Or find out how to create some by using a simpler (and cheaper) method using clear packing tape.
Getting into the Halloween mood is easy and any one of these ideas can be great fun for every member of the family.
Copyright Stefanie Gabrych Fraser. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.
