a spooky mantel

These 3 boys love spooky and scary and spiders,

so we decided to make the downstairs mantel just for them, on a budget of course.

Downstairs is obviously where the fun is…

The pumpkin topiaries are just some old flower urns I spray painted black and stacked some $1.29 pie pumkins from the grocery store.

The silhouette spiders are Martha Stewart from Michaels big Halloween clearance last year: a dad, a mom, and 5 little ones, just like our family

The ghosts were super fun to make:

Get some liquid starch (in the laundry aisle) and pour it into a bucket,

drench some cheesecloth in the starch, and then put it over your ghost form. My “forms” are one of those bed risers with a moss ball on top, and I used a paint can for a taller one as well. But… I wish I would have covered the balls in plastic or foil, because my ghosts have little tiny green moss hairs~you can see them if you look closely in the next picture down. Oh well.

Just let them dry and then use black paper or felt for eyes. They are super stiff and just sit there~don’t they look like they have a mysterious spell cast on them?

The branches are courtesy of some backyard bushes:free! and the stretchable web was also from clearance last year~we put some lights underneath to give it more of an eerie feel.

The boys made the faces on the pumpkins and they are ready to be carved. Do the spiders just freak you out? We think they are very creepy & cool, but I know from a few of the comments on my front porch spiders that some of you are just hating this post. I’m linking up to Beth’s Mantel Party:

this originally was a guest post over at 3 Sun Kissed Boys, but I wanted to share it here as well~