Frightfully Fun!

Yesterday we celebrated Halloween in style with a howlingly fun teen bash.  We spent most of the day hanging webs, lights, and assorted spookiness all around the garage and downstairs family room.  When the guests arrived after dark, they were greeted by my oldest daughter dressed as a skeleton, with her face painted as above.  She led them past the webbed railing and a large spider decorating the garage door.

From there, guests walked down this dark hallway we created by moving and covering our storage shelving and lit by black lights, which made the words above glow eerily.

The creepiest thing about it was the dark, as well as the sound effects provided by Martha Stewart's Spooky Sounds for Halloween CD.  There were small flashlights and little battery powered candle flames here and there, just enough to light up ghostly scenes like the one below.

Finally, at they end, they were treated to a small scare by my ever energetic, hardworking, imaginative and cooperative husband Mark as he peered out of a coffin wearing his corpse mask and costume!  I don't think he scared too many of the kids (as some of them ran up to him right after, gave him a hug and shouted "Mr. Green!"(not exactly the effect we were going for!) but it all set the mood for a great time.

From there, the kids went into the hallway, which was decorated with webs and spiders.  We replaced the ceiling light with a blue bulb which made it look really eerie.  From there, they passed through the orange and black curtain into the party room.

We covered the central i-beam with more webs (I bought 10 packages just to be sure we'd have enough!) and purple twinkle lights.

The food table was set as you see below.  I pretty much covered everything in my studio area with large black plastic tablecloths from the dollar store, and then used more webs and cheesecloth to cover them.  I made a spooky tree with some branches, from which I hung little paper bats.  The girls drew scary ghost faces on some white helium balloons, so they were floating around the table.  The recycled plastic gallon milk jugs had battery powered candles in them as well, making for a nice display in the dark.

 Thank goodness we were able to borrow so many of the decorations and supplies from friends, neighbors, and my friendly neighborhood library (where I got the CD and a few scary movies).  Today we're already starting to take everything down... although I think I'll leave some of it up through Halloween on Thursday....