Decorating Tips

Halloween Decorating Tips!

We've drawn some free artwork for you to download and use in your decorating. Some of the images are easy to cut out and some are quite intricate. You could cut out the simpler black silhouettes or print them all onto transparencies using a home inkjet printer, giving a professional finish. These can then be fixed to your windows, and light shining through the window will give you a dramatic shadow on the ground or wall. The bat looks especially good on light shades, but only use cutouts (and especially transparencies) where they do not form a fire hazard. If you need to mass-produce the cutouts you can cut around one paper version, fold over a black bin bag to give you several layers and then using the paper one as a template cut out lots of black plastic shapes in one go.

Our friends over at fancydress.com have developed some scroll invites for your Pirate-themed fancy dress parties. These invites are designed to look like ancient scrolls but all you would need to do is add some ghoulish text and even some of our clip art (see the big red link below) to make them as Halloweenish as you want! Click here for the invites at fancydress.com.

Black and Orange are now synonymous with Halloween, and for very little cash you can get masses of black fabric from your local market to cover over anything bright in your house or venue. Cut fabric up into strips and tie black bows onto door handles, lamps, indeed anywhere that is not going to form a fire or trip risk. Tables can be covered with disposable coverings, rolls are available from most supermarkets or you could open out black bin liners. Keep an eye out for Halloween confetti; when this is sprinkled over the black tablecloth it looks stunning!

Don't forget to set the scene with your choice of music. Many supermarkets stock ghostly soundtracks, so as your guests arrive you can fill the venue with shrieks, the clanking of chains and blood-chilling moans! As the party gets going you can put on a compilation of horror based songs; how about Thriller, Monster Mash (corny, but great fun), Rocky Horror or the Ghostbusters Theme. You get the idea. Why not use your TV and computer screens as part of your decoration? Have old black and white horror movies playing in the background, search online for Boris Karlof's Frankenstein or Christopher Lee's Dracula. Alternatively you could go for camp classics like Carry On Screaming, Little Shop of Horrors or Rocky Horror Picture Show.
We've put together our own Halloween Playlist for Spotify which you can download here. It's a great party mix with all the spooky classics!

Spider web. You simply cannot have a Halloween party without a lot of this stuff. It arrives in bags looking like white candy floss (very unimpressive), but you open the bag and unwind the web. All of them are good, but to get the best effect you need to get a top quality one, our associates over at www.fancydress.com have one that they import. The TV and film folks use it, so it really is good. The strands of web catch easily onto the corners of almost everything. If you have plants on the way up your path then drape the web between them. Make sure that the web is not used near any flame (if you are using jack-o-lanterns then use a glow stick for added safety! Get your realistic movie spider web here.

Talking about your paths brings us neatly onto the subject of the entrance to your party. This is a space where you can start the theme off; your guests will knock on your door and be held there waiting for you to open your door and it would be a shame to waste the surrounding space! If you live in an apartment block then you still have no excuse, you can decorate your hall.

In the garden, get a variety of long rubber gloves (old ones will be ideal). Fill the gloves with plaster of Paris, and when the gloves have set you can peel the gloves off, paint them a variety of mottled colours (even add some blood) and then bury the wrists in the garden as if corpses are trying to dig their way out of the soil!

Mark out grave-sized plots on your lawn with rows of bricks, make wooden or polystyrene tombstones and add gruesome slogans and dates. Some stores have ready-made fake headstones.

If there are areas of your garden (or inside your venue) that you do not want your guests to go into, cordon them off with black and yellow striped crime-scene tape. A simple Google search for 'Hazard Tape' will bring up suppliers of this; we found several for under £5.00. Stick up the tape over doorways and add a sign saying 'Crime Scene'.

Make a ghost on a rope; take a head-sized ball, an old sheet and some fishing line. Put the ball in the centre of your sheet, and with either a strong elastic band or a few stitches gather the the material so that the ball is held in place. Alternatively, fix the line to the balloon or ball with strong tape. Turn the whole lot over and you should have a head with a ghostly drape hanging down. Cut the edges of the sheet into a ragged style, perhaps make the ghost look a little dirty and then paint on a scary face. Finally, attach the fishing line to the top of the head. You can hang the ghost anywhere you choose, but for extra-special effect tuck the ghost out of the way in a box or behind something, then when you see people arriving you can get someone to pull on the line and the ghost rises up in the air and scares your visitors.

Mini ghosts can be made from large sheets of tissue paper. Roll a sheet into a ball, place that in the middle of a flat sheet and gather it up the same way as above, then add a ghostly face and hanging thread.

Get friendly with your local florist! As Halloween approaches ask them if you can buy flowers that have opened too much to sell; they will be delighted to sell them to you at very small cost. Next, make up vases of flowers with all of the heads cut off! It's subtle but looks really disturbing.

If your Halloween event has food then you can dress up the food section with mini pumpkins, which many supermarkets sell around Halloween, or you could try searching on the internet. We found a place that sells whoppers right the way down to about half a pound. You can take the top off a massive pumpkin and then drop a bowl into the scooped out centre. If you've made pumpkin soup this is the ideal soup tureen. Tiny pumpkins are impossible to carve (not totally true, but how much time do you have?); instead of struggling with tiny ones you can download our pumpkin templates, reduce them on a copier and then paint the design on with paint. If you cannot get hold of tiny pumpkins you could always paint your design onto oranges. They look wonderful scattered about the table or left on narrow window ledges.

Take large branches (perhaps with some leaves still hanging on). Put them into vases and tie a large black ribbon. It looks most effective if you tie the ribbon around the vase rather then around the bunch of twigs, somehow much more funereal!

In the Autumn collect a bin bag full of nice, crisp fallen leaves. These will keep for several months (as long as they are dry and you do not crush them), scatter these along the edges of the path or around your doorway.

Hang black cotton thread from doorways; make them long enough to brush people's faces as they pass under them. It feels like spider's web. Experiment with wetting some of them at the end, it makes them heavier and feels horrible!

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