Halloween Crafts

One of the big joys of Halloween for parents is the chance to spend time with their children working on easy Halloween crafts. Halloween is a time to decorate your home with a completely different theme from the rest of the year. The scary and ghostly themes of Halloween give a wide scope for your children to show off their creativity and handiwork.

Halloween crafts need not be expensive. Some of the best ideas use materials you may well already have in your home. Take, for example, the popular grocery bag ghost. Here is how you can easily make one, or several of them.

Start with a balloon, preferably a white one in keeping with the ghostly theme of Halloween. Blow it up. It's going to hang from the ceiling of your Halloween party room. If you have the opportunity to blow it up with helium so it can float freely and move around the ceiling that is an advantage, because your ghost will then be able to show up in unexpected places, just like a Halloween ghost.

Next, find a couple of white plastic grocery bags, the kind you get from your supermarket. Cut off the handles, and cut them down the sides to make a large flat rectangle. Cut this into strips, about the width of an adult's finger. Attach each strip firmly to the balloon with glue or sticky tape. Work around the lower third of the balloon hanging the strips so they hang like the tentacles of an octopus. You may want to discard any strips that have brightly colored printing, or hang them with the printed side inside.

Finally, use a marker pen and draw round eyes and a mouth on the balloon as a ghostly face in the act of screaming. You may prefer to use luminous paint for the face, and perhaps down some of the strips, so it will glow in the low lighting during your Halloween party.

Hang your ghost from the ceiling so your guests get gently touched by the hanging strips as they move around the room, and get the feeling they may have encountered a Halloween ghost.

Another craft project to hang from the ceiling is an egg carton spider. Cut out the egg cups to make the body of your spiders. Place them on a sheet of newspaper and paint them black, inside and out. This works best with egg cartons made of recycled paper rather than plastic. When they have dried, make four holes down one side, and repeat on the opposite side. Insert four long black pipe cleaners through each pair of holes to make eight spider's legs. Bend the legs so they look like spider's legs.

Add two eyes at the head of your spider. You could use white or luminous paint, or the kind of stick-on googly eyes you can buy at craft shops. Insert a knotted thread through the center of the egg cup, so the spider can be suspended from the ceiling without tilting too much. Hang your large hairy spiders on their threads in places where they will scare your guests.