Halloween Porch Decorations

The Frugal Hostess likes to decorate her front porch for the various holidays and seasons.  She sometimes buys decorations (usually at the after-holiday sales), but she really prefers throwing things together.  After the graduation party a few weeks back, TFH decided she would definitely make a fabric banner for Halloween using purple, green, black, and orange fabric.   Easier said than done, as it happened.  None of her fabric scraps were the right colors, and the thrift stores were suspiciously barren of fabric scrap bags.  [Do note that most thrift stores sell giant bags of fabric remnants for next to nothing - like, two dollars - TFH just had bad luck.  If you like to use fabric in your crafts, get thee to a thrift store.  Plus, you usually get random colors and patterns that you wouldn't pick out but are glad to have.]  She was finally able to score single napkins and pillow cases in the right colors, and away she went.  Instructions are here, if you missed it.

 
Next, she planned to use some of the things she made last year.  In a fit of new home owner crafting, The Frugal Hostess made bat mobiles, witches' hat garlands, a pumpkin still life, and a bunch of other stuff last Halloween.  While the decorations themselves fell apart, paper perhaps not being the most long-lasting of choices for outside decor, TFH saved all of her templates, ribbon, and other odds and ends in a box in the basement.

But wait!  Didn't her basement flood recently?  Oh no!  What happened to all of the templates?  (Doesn't that just sound like something that would get uttered in all seriousness in an accounting office somewhere?)  Well, Dear Reader(s?), they were rescued.  Whew.


For the door, FruHo (Yes.  Like J-Lo.) envisioned a creepy black wreath with a glow-in-the-dark skeleton.  Because she already had the skeleton and couldn't figure out what to do with it.  Here's how it went down.  TFH had purchased a huge lot of embroidery hoops at a thrift store a while back, because they are the perfect thing to use for paper craft mobiles, wreaths, etc.  She took two of them, one large and one small, and taped them together.  Then, using a pair of black tights that she sliced up, she wrapped the wreath shape to cover the tape.  (You could also spray paint it).  Next, she took a long and winding black scarf and wrapped it around the wreath, followed by a long piece of black velvet ribbon.  All of this was loosely secured with a couple of safety pins.  The final touch was to dangle the little skeleton from the wreath.  Now, you are probably normal and thus lacking in a storehouse of embroidery hoops, but the point here is to use what you have rather than spending a fortune on decorations.

To flank the fabric banner, TFH decided to make a couple of bat mobiles (mow-bull, not Bat Mobile like what Batman drives).  Detailed instructions are forthcoming soon, but these would be slightly less complicated than last year's bat-a-palooza, while making use of the already existing bat templates.  Brill.  She got out the box of templates, placed it on the table, and began to work.  She cut out the bats, did all the steps, blah blah blah to be explained in a later post.  And then she walked away from the table for a few minutes to talk to The Frugal Husband.  At which point one of the assholes cats peed into the box of templates.  That's right, folks; the templates that had been carefully tucked away for a year, then rescued from flood waters, were destroyed by cat piss.  All the more reason not to spend a lot of money on decorations, in The Frugal Hostess's humble opinion.

BOO!

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