Decorate for Halloween

Every year we host a costume party at our house for Halloween. We invite all of our closest friends and try our hardest to outdo last year’s costumes. Sometimes we create a haunted house, we always have tons of food, and of course we host a costume contest as well as a pumpkin-carving contest each year.

As you can guess, the decorations for our party are pretty important! They set the mood and give everyone something to ooh and ah over at the party. Starting with the party invitations all the way down to party favors and games, my scrapbook supplies play a BIG part in the party preparations. Whether you’re planning a party or just decorating your house for the holiday, think about using your scrapbook supplies to create some of these spooky decorations.

Invitations – Party invitations can be easily mass produced with a pumpkin diecut, some Halloween-themed paper, cardstock, and ribbon. Don’t forget to back the pumpkin diecut with yellow paper. It will make it look like a candle is lighting up the jack-o’-lantern.

Wall Hangings – Create a wall-hanging decoration by making three Halloween-themed layouts on 8” x 8” cardstock. You can use photos from past Halloweens or you can create pages without photos that are more a decorative collage. Mount the layouts on foam core, and drill holes in the four corners. Then use wire or string to attach them to each other and hang them vertically from a nail on the wall. You can also use a smaller sized layout, such as 6” x 6” and add a new layout each year with photos from that Halloween. It will be a growing decoration!

Tags for Candy Bags – If you’re bringing treats to a classroom, or handing out trick-or-treat candy at your front door, consider dressing up the candy bags with a little bit of ribbon and a themed tag. Die-cut tags and Halloween-themed stickers make this a quick process that looks great.

Table Centerpiece – An accordion album makes a great table centerpiece. This one was created by adding a patterned paper to each page of the accordion, and then adding die-cut letters to spell out “Happy Halloween.” The edges of each page were painted with black acrylic paint, and then stickers and ribbon were added as finishing touches. Since it all folds up, it’s also an easy decoration to store for next year.

Confetti – Small punches in the shapes of pumpkins, ghosts, candy corn, spiders and leaves are a great way to use up some scrap pieces of paper and make a fun decoration. Themed confetti can be used to make a table, the mantle, or your party invitations even more festive.

Pumpkin-Carving Contest Labels – At our party, each of our guests brings a carved pumpkin to enter into our pumpkin-decorating contest. As they arrive, we place the pumpkins throughout the house and number them with place cards. I used white cardstock, black ink, a spooky set of number stamps, and orange and yellow chalk to dress up our pumpkin place cards. Since they’re just numbered, we can re-use them each year.

Candy Bucket – An inexpensive black plastic cauldron can be dressed up with ribbon and paper. Glue a themed ribbon around the top edge of the cauldron. Then use orange cardstock, patterned paper, and alphabet stamps to label your candy bucket with a spooky title like “Witches Brew.”

These are just a few fun ideas to get you started. Take a fresh look at your scrapbooking supplies and see how they can be used to make festive decorations for Halloween!

Shop Scrapjazz.com for a large selection of Halloween Scrapbook products.