She's Crafty

Haunted House Display

I feel like we have had a slow start on our Fall and Halloween activities this year, but I'm excited to share with you what we've been working on this week.

We originally we were going to just make the big haunted house on the right, but we took the kids for a Halloween Kids Meal at Arctic Circle earlier last week and I looked at the boxes and thought, "Oh my goodness, those would make the cutest little haunted houses!" So me, Andy and Luke all made our own.


I've seen several different tutorials for these houses all over the Internet, but the one I used was from Disney Famiy Fun. I used 2 empty tissue boxes for the bottom two layers and then an instant oatmeal box for the top.

We had to use 2 coats of black acrylic paint to thoroughly coat our houses and we let them dry completely before cutting out our doors and window. We then used white paint to add details to our shutters and roofs.


After all the details were finished on our houses we scrunched up a piece of orange tissue paper and put it inside. Then to make our ghosts, we used the instructions from Disney Family Fun, except instead of using Styrofoam balls for the inside, we just formed a small ball out of tissue paper for the inside.


I found this frame at the Dollar Store and thought it would be a fun alternative to what I've seen around blogland lately. Instead of putting the eyeballs on the outside frame, the boys painted the matting inside the frame purple and then glued the eyeballs to the matting. Our wiggly eyes came from Craft Project Ideas in the Rainy Day Package they sent us. We already know how much I LOVE wiggly eyes and I'm telling you, you will never go wrong buying a package of these Kids Crafts Brand wiggly eyes at your local Wal-Mart.


After assembling the frame together I put some green skull ribbon around the frame and made the "eek!" with white glitter cardboard stickers and thick metallic green paper I already had. I'm really happy with how the frame turned out because it's more like a shadow box frame with the eyeballs inside. It's pretty cool! By the way, isn't the picture inside the frame the cutest?? hahaha! It was taken 2 years ago on Halloween. I can't believe how much they've grown!


Now I can't forget to tell you about the fun book we read to go along with our Haunted House craft. We read The Haunted House by Graham Percy. I absolutely ADORE this book and let me tell you why. I have children who are very literal. They see all this Halloween scary stuff and honestly, it makes them a little scared. We have had our share of being scared of Monsters, being afraid of the Dark and being scared of toys that come alive at night when children are sleeping (Toy Story)....NOT KIDDING! hahaha!


So in this book, a group of animals decide to go on a trip but their bus breaks down when it's dark and rainy. They see a house up on the hill nearby and decide to go up to take refuge for the night. The house is empty (of course!) so they all find a place to go to sleep when suddenly, everyone is startled by different creepy things like a huge snake, a spider with 100 legs, a 2 headed man, etc. The animals are so scared that they run out of the house and take refuge in a little cave all snuggled together for the night.


Two of the animals had stayed behind to fix the bus and when they arrived in the morning they took everyone back to the house to make sense of all the scary creatures they had seen. It turns out there weren't really any scary creatures at all. The big snack was really just a vacuum hose that looked spooky in the dark, the spider with 100 legs was really just the shadow from a tree outside blowing in the breeze. You get the point!