Jeremy told me to post these photos before Halloween but I’m all like Nah, that’s too easy 🙂  I’m gonna keep it true to me.  So while most bloggers are talking Christmas already, I want to just share what we did this past weekend.  It’s more natural to me….like if you met me in the diaper aisle and asked, “Oh how was your weekend?  What were the boys for halloween?  Did you decorate?” and I whip out my cell phone and show you photos.  That is us right now….between the Luvs and Huggies sharing Halloween pictures.  There might be a crying kid who wants another cookie from the bakery but let’s ignore them and talk the Halloween decorations while shoving goldfish into their hands.  (note that I am very good at imagining things as they truly are and then stressing you out verbally on Monday morning.  You’re welcome.)
First up…the decorations! Â Our theme this year was infested!
Will told me that he wanted to put up three hundred thousand million spiders.  We just went with a ton of spiderwebs instead 🙂
The front door got the cheesecloth and dollar store spiders hung on it. Â I attached the cheesecloth with tape on the other side and it held up great.
We recycle the mums from our Pumpkin Painting Party for the front porch every year. Â This year I might try to plant them….I don’t know if they can survive the winter but we shall see!
When we cleaned out the basement for our friends, I found a bunch of old treasures…including this pumpkin ghost accessory kid.  It has those sharp metal rods that stab into the pumpkin making it the easiest decoration in history.  I bought this in college.  I know.  I am a weirdo that bought home decor in my early twenties instead of shoes 🙂
The porch will get tweaked this week for Thanksgiving (mostly edit out the Halloween stuff and put a couple wreaths up) but honestly my Thanksgiving/Harvest game is terrible. Â I need to step that up a notch.
Step inside the front door and I decorated a little table near the stairs. Â I was going for a monochromatic look with lots of stripes. Â Stripes are very scary people. Â Terrifying. Â Especially around my hips.
This is a new look but everything was in my stash except for the skull board. Â That is just a scrap piece of wood I painted stripes on and then hot glued the skulls to. Â Will calls them “sklel-te-on”….I don’t have the heart to correct him. Â It’s the cutest version of a gruesome item.
Our candy bowl this year was just a white ceramic bowl. Â The candy didn’t go out until the 30th….although I have to admit, this is the SECOND big bag of candy because somebody (okay it was me…Jeremy helped) ate it all.
The funnest project was definitely the mummy vase. Â Weston helped me make it and Will jumped in at the end and I think it turned out pretty fun! Â It is just one of those plastic masks from the craft store (I’ve used it before) and we wrapped up the vase with strips from a torn bed sheet.
At night it glows and gets really spooky!  We love seeing the face appear!  And this time we got to talk about mummification and how it is a real thing and how ‘explorers’ have discovered real mummies.  Will was THRILLED to hear all about it….and then he asked if Jeremy’s Grandma was a mummy 🙂
The kitchen shelves always get a little sprucing too.  You can look up the hashtag #bowershelfie on Instagram and see a bunch of different ones 🙂
I wasn’t going for a direct theme…just halloween colors this time.
I really love the framed picture of a pumpkin.  It’s just some black and white fabric framed with a cut out of a pumpkin picture on the front.  I think next year I will do the same thing but a GIANT pumpkin picture 🙂
Today is the day to go get some after-halloween clearance items!  At Michael’s it is 80% off and Hobby Lobby is 50% off today and gets more discounted as time goes on!  Last year I got these cute orange bowls and a pack of straws for twenty cents each 🙂
I questioned whether or not to show you some of the not-so-pretty pictures of our Halloween stuff but then I knew the grandparents would love seeing it. Â Jeremy’s mom gave us some vintage window clings and we hung those up all over. Â The boys also made pumpkin frames with their photos. Â The foam frames were from Oriental Trading (thanks Sarah for sharing those with us!) and the pictures we took on the spot and printed with my wireless 4×6 printer (it’s the Selphy Printer
On the table, we put a cake stand and all the little crafts that come home from school go there.  We have found that gathering small items together (whether it’s a special treat item or a craft or a pumpkin bracelet from church) makes it easier to choose what to keep and what we need to say goodbye to.  I think in the future I might need a bigger cake plate though 🙂
So that is our Halloween decor for 2015….fun but nothing too scary 🙂  I love a good freight-fest but since my guys are so little, it’s nice to be able to just embrace the more realistic (spiders, skeletons, and mummies, oh my!) side of things without any nightmare-inducing stuff.  Heaven knows we all need our sleep around here….especially with all that extra sugar in our veins 🙂
What did you do for decorations this past weekend? Link up if you blogged about it – I would love to see.  And tomorrow we have a fun Halloween recap of our kiddo’s costumes and our front-porch pumpkin carving tradition…let’s just say that LJ was a huge fan 🙂
Love your decorations, especially your front door area. As for the mums, I am not sure about all mums but if they are Garden Mums, they will come back every year. I got 5 when we lived in Alabama and moved them to our house in Georgia and they come up every year. I also had them in PA and they came up every year. Good luck.
The vase/light/mask thing is the coolest spooky decoration I’ve ever seen. So creative! How did you get the light inside?
Also I think your Thanksgiving game is strong even if you just leave up the front porch stuff but de-spider-fy it. Pumpkins and mums (plus a little burlap or straw bale action if you have some) is perfect for Thanksgiving!!
Cheesecloth is amazing for Halloween decorations! Your front door looks great, as always.
How do u manage to always make it look so good!! And what do you do with the decorations after? Do u give it away because you don’t seem to use the same decorations every year?
The mummy vase is awesome! I may have to steal that next year! I meant to do some great Halloween decorating this year, buuuut it just didn’t happen. It went more like this: http://returnoflight.blogspot.com/2015/10/basically-some-half-assed-pumpkin.html
Mums are perennials so they should last all winter in the ground – and get bigger for next year. My yard (in MD is FULL of mums (they are my favorite).
We skipped most decorations this year (just a couple general-fall-themed-things) as we have too many boring home renovation repairs to focus on (plumbers, electricians, gutter-cleaning, etc… sigh). I just wanted to say I actually enjoyed seeing the vintage window clings the most! It’s so cute that they are a little different looking than what everyone else is buying at Target or Michaels – it’s a great idea to look for something like that! I’m on the hunt for vintage glass ornaments for the holidays, so maybe retro stuff is just on my mind!
Super cute! Love the idea of putting cheesecloth on the doors…I just stuck to spiderwebs, but the cheesecloth is a great idea. And I agree…we kept it pretty non-scary this year too, lots of time for more scary Halloween’s! My toddler was all about the “ghoosts” this year, haha 😉
I was inspired by one of your past wreaths and made a mummy arm/hand holding a white grapevine wreath (it had glow in the dark snakes on it). We also hung up some larger spiders on our front porch with our carved pumpkins. Oh and we made a homemade scarecrow that sat in one of our porch rockers. We actually had a rather large pre-trick or treating potluck at our house. There were 26 toddlers running around the place. However, I think everyone had a blast and a lot of people brought Halloween inspired food which boosted the festivities.
I love it. I need to hit up the Halloween clearance. By far my favorite part of every holiday;)
Will aways has the best ideas! I love the black decorations the most. That’s what I’m going to do next year, I think!
I don’t decorate much. The kids make some crafts and I hang them up inside. This year I decided to decorate the door. http://controllingcraziness.blogspot.com/2015/10/trick-or-treat-2015.html
I might do this every year, it was fun.
I actually do use the same decorations! We buy new pumpkins, hay and flowers but usually we just add to the buckets and arrange them differently 🙂
xo – kb
It’s a big glass vase so I just pop a candle inside 🙂
xo – kb
So cute!!!
I would love to know the trick to getting your spider webs to look amazing! I mean, yours look like webs, mine are always clumpy and look nothing like a spider web!
Keep pulling! One big clump goes super far!
xo – kb