Turning Your Home Into A Halloween Treat
Halloween is a time for scares, chills, spooks and ghosts. This year, with a few simple tricks, you can turn your home into a haunted house.
The first thing you should do to turn your home into a haunted house is to make a diagram of the floor plan. Then decide which way the kids will be coming in and how they will be going out. Start plotting where the scary spots will be. What are scary spots you ask?
Scary spots are the little nooks and crannies where you hide before the evil action takes place. The number of spots you have depends on the number of people you have helping you. Sometimes, if you have a really good helper, they can sneak from one spot to the next without being seen.
You can make scary spots by using old sheets, fake spiderwebs, cornstalks or any other Halloween displays you might have lying around.
For around $5 you can get a 10 x 20' roll of black plastic. This is useful for making cheap capes, gargoyle wings and instant rooms and walls. You can also make a quick doorway by cutting strips down a plastic partition wall you have hung up. When anyone walks through it, the hanging strips will drag over them, giving them the illusion of someone touching them.
Another good, cheap all-purpose prop is a dummy. All you need to make one are newspaper or leaves, old clothes (pants and a long-sleeved shirt), some shoes and gloves, clear nylon thread, a needle and an old pillowcase.
First you need to stuff the fingers of the gloves with newspaper or leaves, then stuff the rest of the glove. Using the clear thread, sew the gloves to the ends of the long-sleeved shirts. Stuff the arms next. To give the arms and legs more definition, form tubes out of the newspaper and stuff those. When the arms are finished, stuff the chest. Don't stuff it all the way, though. Sew the shoes to the end of the pants and stuff the legs. When that's done, sew the shirt to them and stuff the waist and stomach area. Finish stuffing the chest and do any shaping of dummy.
For the head, take a pillowcase and turn it inside out. With a marker, draw a simple outline of a head and neck shape on it. It should look like an upside-down vase with the open end of the pillowcase serving as that end. Sew along your marker lines. It doesn't have to be perfect; it just needs to look like a head. Turn the pillowcase right side out and stuff it. Sew it onto the rest of your dummy body. You can either draw on a face or use colored cloth and sew a face. If you would prefer, you can use a store-bought pumpkin head or a latex mask (using a styrofoam wig stand for support) for the head. You can also buy latex hands. Finally, decide where you are going to put your dummy and how you are going to display it.
Lighting, or the lack of it, helps set the mood for your Halloween event. Turn lights down, even completely off, and use candles for a spooky atmosphere. If you have young children coming in, you might want to skip the candles and substitute dark-colored light bulbs instead.
Add other spooky things to make your house haunted. Make shrunken heads out of apples and place them around your house in unexpected places, such as kitchen chairs, the bottom of the snack bowl or overlooking the food. Put some spooky Halloween music on the stereo. Make pipe cleaners and cotton balls into spiders and scatter those around the food and in chairs or hang them from the ceiling. Spread cobwebs you can purchase from party stores across the room. Be sure to place some of your pipe-cleaner spiders in the webs. Cover your furniture with white sheets and scatter talcum powder to create dust clouds when your guests move or sit. This will make it seem even more like a real, deserted haunted house.
Sometimes the best memories are the ones of your first good scare on Halloween. Keeping that in mind, have a scary good time this year turning your home into a haunted house.
Halloween is a time for scares, chills, spooks and ghosts. This year, with a few simple tricks, you can turn your home into a haunted house.
The first thing you should do to turn your home into a haunted house is to make a diagram of the floor plan. Then decide which way the kids will be coming in and how they will be going out. Start plotting where the scary spots will be. What are scary spots you ask?
Scary spots are the little nooks and crannies where you hide before the evil action takes place. The number of spots you have depends on the number of people you have helping you. Sometimes, if you have a really good helper, they can sneak from one spot to the next without being seen.
You can make scary spots by using old sheets, fake spiderwebs, cornstalks or any other Halloween displays you might have lying around.
For around $5 you can get a 10 x 20' roll of black plastic. This is useful for making cheap capes, gargoyle wings and instant rooms and walls. You can also make a quick doorway by cutting strips down a plastic partition wall you have hung up. When anyone walks through it, the hanging strips will drag over them, giving them the illusion of someone touching them.
Another good, cheap all-purpose prop is a dummy. All you need to make one are newspaper or leaves, old clothes (pants and a long-sleeved shirt), some shoes and gloves, clear nylon thread, a needle and an old pillowcase.
First you need to stuff the fingers of the gloves with newspaper or leaves, then stuff the rest of the glove. Using the clear thread, sew the gloves to the ends of the long-sleeved shirts. Stuff the arms next. To give the arms and legs more definition, form tubes out of the newspaper and stuff those. When the arms are finished, stuff the chest. Don't stuff it all the way, though. Sew the shoes to the end of the pants and stuff the legs. When that's done, sew the shirt to them and stuff the waist and stomach area. Finish stuffing the chest and do any shaping of dummy.
For the head, take a pillowcase and turn it inside out. With a marker, draw a simple outline of a head and neck shape on it. It should look like an upside-down vase with the open end of the pillowcase serving as that end. Sew along your marker lines. It doesn't have to be perfect; it just needs to look like a head. Turn the pillowcase right side out and stuff it. Sew it onto the rest of your dummy body. You can either draw on a face or use colored cloth and sew a face. If you would prefer, you can use a store-bought pumpkin head or a latex mask (using a styrofoam wig stand for support) for the head. You can also buy latex hands. Finally, decide where you are going to put your dummy and how you are going to display it.
Lighting, or the lack of it, helps set the mood for your Halloween event. Turn lights down, even completely off, and use candles for a spooky atmosphere. If you have young children coming in, you might want to skip the candles and substitute dark-colored light bulbs instead.
Add other spooky things to make your house haunted. Make shrunken heads out of apples and place them around your house in unexpected places, such as kitchen chairs, the bottom of the snack bowl or overlooking the food. Put some spooky Halloween music on the stereo. Make pipe cleaners and cotton balls into spiders and scatter those around the food and in chairs or hang them from the ceiling. Spread cobwebs you can purchase from party stores across the room. Be sure to place some of your pipe-cleaner spiders in the webs. Cover your furniture with white sheets and scatter talcum powder to create dust clouds when your guests move or sit. This will make it seem even more like a real, deserted haunted house.
Sometimes the best memories are the ones of your first good scare on Halloween. Keeping that in mind, have a scary good time this year turning your home into a haunted house.
