I’ve said before how much I love love love Christmas and that I pretty much celebrate Christmas from mid-October to February or so (true story).  And although I’ve always thought Halloween was fun, I’ve never really gotten that into the Halloween-spirit (decorating or otherwise).   But oddly enough (or maybe it’s normal, not sure?)  my two year old is borderline obsessed with Halloween and all things “spooky” — like he has been talking about Halloween since last Halloween (and that’s a long time ago when you’re two).  So I thought I’d indulge him and we’ve gotten our spook on together. 

I didn’t really even know where to start, and didn’t really have a vision for what I wanted it to be when I was done — but I thought the most obvious place was my mantel.  So I got to work.   Here was my regular, non-seasonal mantle:

And then I did a little searching around the old information superhighway — and there are soooo many cute ideas out there!  I found inspiration from here and there and mixed and matched.  And came up with this:

And the whole thing was like maybe $12 (maybe even a little less, I can’t remember exactly)?   The Dollar Store is your friend people.  Here’s what I did:

{1} the wreath — took a Dollar Store foam wreath, spray painted it black.  Got 3 five-foot garlands of some lovely (and by lovely I mean so so ugly) fall leaves — and then I spray painted those black.  Cut the leaves off the vine, hot-glued those suckers right onto my wreath.  Like $4 and maybe 30 minutes.  Me likey.

The wreath was a little small for the space, so I just tossed an old empty frame up there around it, to fill up space.  Does it work?

 

{2} bird in a glass cage (or cloche — but cage seems spookier) — took a Dollar Store bird, took a glass vase I already had.  Flipped it upside down, trapping said bird.  Ta da!  That one was tricky. 

{3} stylin’ white pumpkin — I love white pumpkins and last year I found them everywhere, but not yet this year (or maybe I haven’t looked hard enough; it’s hard to know).  So I grabbed a … you guessed it … Dollar Store pumpkin, gave her a quite spray with heirloom white and then stretch some fishnet fabric over. 

I stuck this sassy pumpkin on a cake stand that I made by hot-gluing a plastic plate (yellow plate, meet black spray paint) on top of a thick candleholder I was no longer using.  Free.  Love it.

{4} Did anyone else know that the Dollar Store has these battery-powered votives?  If you did — why didn’t you tell me?  I am going to go back and buy like a billion more for Christmas.  And my regular life.   I love that they look real, and yet I don’t worry about my spiderman toddler scaling my fireplace (it’s happened before) and then burning down my house.  I just switched out my old candles (real, but only decorative) for these guys.  It looked a little bare, so I hot glued some black lace that I had in my stash around them.  I love that they look like little skirts. 

{5} And for my big glass thingy (I think it’s technically a vase, not sure?)  I just kept the moss that I already had, and strategically tossed in a few spiders and webs (thank you Dollar Store). 

And then I finished it all off with a sprinkling of rats, spiders, bats and other bugs.  One bag of mixed creepy crawlies from …. the Dollar Store was all I needed. 

The best part of this was that I did every part with my son.  Well, not the spray painting and the hot glue (although he wanted to do those parts the most, because of the “gun like” nature of the equipment).  It was so fun for us — and yeah, it’s not perfect and I’ve definitely seen better.  But he is so so proud of it — every person that comes to our door, he says “So, what’chu think about our spooky stuff?”

Oh, and I’m linking up here, here and here and here.