Creepy Halloween Crafts, Costumes and Goodies!
This Halloween should be a little more active and fun than 2020, with fall festivals, plus costumed littles, tweens and teens walking the neighborhoods or visiting trunk or treat sites to fill goodie bags with candy for a sure-fire sugar rush! We found a few fun ideas for crafty décor and more than a couple of recipes to make this Halloween frightfully good!
Spooktacular Decor
Jenn at Eating Bender went all out for a Harry Potter party, which is not such a far cry from the season of spookiness. From invitations and a grand entryway with floating candles suspended from the ceiling, to a scary staircase with spiders and webbing and a Potter Party menu (complete with soft drinks and hard ones!) 
Perfect for a kids’ Halloween party or just kinder, gentler decorations for the youngest trick-or-treaters, these sweet and funny floating ghosts have happy cartoon faces that will make everyone smile.
All you need are some white helium balloons on strings, white tissue paper, a black marker, double-stick tape, and some optional tissue paper in accent colors (such as pink for a tongue). Check out Studio DIY for step-by-step directions—or improvise your own silly faces!
DIY Make-up and Costumes
If you love dressing up and the make-up fun that goes along with Halloween (the #1 reason people participate in this ghoulish holiday), then you’ll love watching a spooky SFX tutorial on YouTube by 123GO! Using blue foundation, white highlighter and powder and eyeliner and plenty of black and purple and you can become a skeletal bride in about an hour.
Any littles in your house want to be a fluffy bird for Halloween? Again, 123GO! has a trick or treat tutorial that takes a hoodie and some feather boas to create the costume. With a couple of giant eyes, a blue wig and a heart for the beak, and your little will look a lot more avian!
To make your own nail polish that glows in the dark all you’ll need is your normal nail polish and a bottle of neutral Glo-Paint or Glow-Away to paint on top of your dry polished nails. Mod Podge Rocks offers the complete tutorial—don’t forget to prime your nails under bright lights so they’ll glow when the lights are off!
Multi-Colored Pumpkins
Love, love, love these ideas from Country Living, that range from leaf motifs — decoupaged or outlined and painted — and faux bois effects (etched to an artistic imitation of wood) stenciled white pumpkins and scary reverse images this collection of 68 easy painted pumpkins covers ALL the bases. These designs are all over the decor spectrum, from quaint and country, to elegant, upscale and spooktacularly creative. If you have a bit of artistic ability, try #7; a farm scene with a barn, windmill, bats, a full moon and cornstalks, drawn with black, white and gray paint pens.
Or try this rainbow pumpkin patch from The House That Lars Built, with a great palette of bright colors. The directions couldn’t be simpler: bring home a bunch of pumpkins in assorted sizes, choose a selection of house and acrylic paints in a rainbow of colors, tape off the stems, paint each pumpkin a different color, and then arrange on your porch in rainbow order. The more pumpkins, the better!
Are you tired of pumpkin-colored everything? For a twist on the colors of the season, try filling your porch with a muted rainbow patch of pumpkins! This decor project is also an easy craft project for the kids!
Frightfully Good Goodies
From peanut butter “eyeballs” and witch finger pretzel rods to skull caramel apples, make no bones about it, these frightfully ghoulish goodies are as fun to make as they are to eat! Spruce Eats has a few dozen ideas and recipes for creepy candy, Frankenstein marshmallow pops, white chocolate ghosts, jack-o-lantern Rice Krispie® treats and more!
Not so very scary are the chocolate-dipped Oreo-on-a-stick Spiders, easy enough for kids to help make! Chelsea’s Messy Apron offers a video tutorial, but basically all you need are Oreos, melted chocolate chips, lollipop sticks, black licorice laces for legs, and candy eyes.
Cut through all the sugar with a brilliant way to get the kids to eat their veggies—this adorable Vegetable Skeleton from Good Housekeeping. A small glass bowl filled with ranch dressing is the head, with black olives for eyes, a leaf of lettuce for the hair, and the “bones” of the skeleton’s body: carefully-arranged carrot sticks, red pepper slices, celery sticks, and cucumber rounds!
Gearing up for Halloween at Crystal Valley!
Fall Festivals and Halloween celebrations in the master-planned community of Crystal Valley mean food, fantasy and fun. Come and explore the new homes surrounded by nature and only minutes from the town of Castle Rock. With 10+ decorated models from Richmond American Homes, Kauffman Homes, Century Communities and D.R. Horton, the thoughtfully designed ranch or two-story models – are priced from the $400s.
