DIY Outdoor Halloween Decorations – featuring a Full Moon

The star of this years DIY outdoor halloween decorations, wasn’t even supposed to be the the Full Moon. Halloween front porch decor is like a national sport in this household each October. See, what happened was, we were in Walmart and I needed to get food coloring. The food coloring is sold in the same aisle as the magazines. While in that aisle looking for Wilton Orange Icing, my daughter decided to pick up a magazine to browse through. Above all magazines on the shelf she picked up Country Living‘s Halloween Decoration issue.

And above all pages she turned to it had to be this image of a cascade of bats across a front door. If you haven’t seen it, you haven’t been on Pinterest where it’s been pinned about 10000 times.

“Mommy can we decorate our door like that this year?”

“Yes dear I’ll cut out 100 bats for you and duct tape them to our walls”. That was my outside voice too.

Our DIY Outdoor Halloween Decorations – The Bats

Ok. Felt.

Which is what they recommend to make the bats with, here in Canada isn’t cheap. Let me re-phrase that. It isn’t cheap to me per quantity of bats that I needed to cut out. So I picked up a roll of craft foam at our local dollar store where I could get 74″ (just over 6 feet) for $1.25. Then I began to cut out bats.

I folded the foam sheets in half and used chalk to make the outline, which made it way easier to cut out each bat.

Foam is great for two reasons.

• It’s waterproof
• It’s reusable. Meaning you can re-use them again next year so you don’t have to cut them out all over again.

However, if you have a blog, doing the same Halloween decorations on your blog year after year, may not be that enticing for your readers. Says the one who is copying one of the top Halloween DIY pins on Pinterest.

When both grown adults and a 5 year olds think it’s cool, you know you’ve made a hell of a great DIY.  So kudos Country Living.

I made three different bat sizes.

TIP FOR WHEN YOU’RE CUTTING OUT BATS:

If I can give you one word of advice after doing this, make more smaller sized bats, and less bigger sized bats. When you build your swarm of bats, you want your big bats to be the focal point surrounded by the smaller ones. I wound up trimming a lot of the bigger bats.

Our DIY Outdoor Halloween Decorations – The Trees

In the meantime during the week that I was making the bats I came across a dead tree branch on the side of an empty road I drive on everyday. After a week it was taunting me.

So it came home with me.

Halloween Wreath

I also found two metal star wreaths at the thrift store that I thought could use a good update.

If you’re a fan of taupe or beige, turn away now.

 And it all kind of came together like this.

But something was still missing for me.

For one the bat wings were flopping around.

I tried to justify it to myself by saying, “Oh they look like they’re flying”,  but that ended pretty fast the more the bat wings curled into each other . T the foam started resembling bat balls and not bats. So I went back and re-taped them on properly so their wings were flat on the siding.

And then I thought what good are scary bats, black crows and tree branches if they’re not in the shadow of a full moon.

So I made a moon.

For outdoor Halloween decor, 75% of your Halloween front porch at night, will be about your lighting.

It doesn’t seem like much right? But wait until it gets dark and you can light it up.

How to make the FULL MOON decoration

The moon was ridiculously easy to make and the effect looked really cool in real life. Way better than these photos can show.

I just hoping to get some glow out of it, but it actually wound up doing a really did a great job of lighting up the entire porch. Especially when it got really dark at night, and brought out all the shadows from the tree branches. We had a ton of candles on the porch as well as lit up Jack O Lanterns, and of course I have no photos to show of it.

Back to the moon.

• Get an embroidery hoop and spray paint it white
• Put a white pillowcase in it and trim it to size.
• Hang it off the tree or location of your choice with fishing line.
• Behind the embroidery hoop, use one of those stick on LED touch lights.
• And you get yourself a pretty kick ass full moon!

We had a couple of hundred trick or treater’s that night. That’s not a typo. Get your candy this week ladies and gentlemen. Last year we almost ran out.

Welcome to suburbia. The only place where your Halloween decorations will cost you less than the candy that you will give out.