Nuts to You, Premade Halloween Decorations!

I have absolutely had it with premade Halloween decorations.  They are too expensive to be as cheaply made as they are.  I was all excited and ready to get an upside down hanging spider victim with light up eyes that screamed and shook, until I saw one in person.  It was horrible!  A $40 prop and you could see the styrofoam body form!  After much rage I finally calmed down enough to realize what the solution is.  It was so obvious.  Start making things myself.  And that is just what I'm going to do!  No more crap purchased bits, I'm going on a mad ride down creativity lane.

I have many ambitious plans for what I shall make.  However, they do require some additional planning for logistic and budget reasons so I decided to start small.  One thing that has always bothered me is how sparse my walls look once the art is down and the decorations go up.  I've got a ton of Halloween decorations but most of them seem to be rather on the small side and there are always giant, gaping spaces between things and it looks weird. So, DIY project number 1 is make bats.  I saw this on Pinterest and decided that it was the way to go for a few reasons.  The first of which is that I already had construction paper.  Projects are more fun when you don't have to buy a bunch of extra stuff for them (because then you can use the budget somewhere else and get MORE stuff (-;  ).  Secondly, the only thing I need to get for them is some sticky-tack to hang them and I can reuse it for Halloween next year or anything else that might need hanging.  I'm a big fan of reusable decorations because re-buying stuff is stupid unless it's something like spiderwebs which just don't recycle well.

For the bats I needed a template.  I could have freehanded them but I'm really bad at making things symmetrical and while other people tell me my sketches of stuff look good, they ALWAYS look weird to me.  I dug around online for a while and decided on this template.  There are a bunch out there, but I liked this one because it gives you three different sized bats on one sheet of paper.  If you want to use them all you have to print it out twice because the biggest bat goes across the page.

Once I had the template I was ready to rock and roll.  I found a silver quilters pencil in my craft stuff which let me draw lines I could see on the black construction paper and got to work.  I traced bats through an episode of Top Gear and most of The Shining which was on after.  After much tracing I was ready to cut out bats.  Let me tell you, cutting out tons of tiny shapes is a LOT harder when you're an adult and haven't had to cut things out in something like 10 years.  My thumb was killing me by the time I got them done.

Now I have many paper bats that I can decorate with!  I still have more paper so I will probably make some more just to make sure I have enough.  The current count is 12 big bats, 13 medium bats, and 21 small bats.

Design testing has begun!