Creepy Crafts for a Low-Waste Halloween

Don’t throw out the trash just yet! If you are looking for some fun crafts to celebrate Halloween use some of those materials to make the holiday less wasteful and less frightful. In less than an hour, you can have some fun décor for this weekend.

• Cardboard Tombstone: 

Fake tombstones are a Halloween staple and it’s both fun and easy to make your own. Pick out your saying that you want inscribed first. Then gather the materials. You will need a cardboard box the size that you want your tombstone to be, foamboard, an exacto knife, a pencil or printed words, tape, paint, paintbrushes, and glue.

Print out the saying you want inscribed and cut out each word individually. You can skip this step if you want to draw out your own design and just take your pencil and lightly draw what you would like on the board instead. Then, tape your words onto the foamboard in the order and layout you want. Make sure that you aren’t using more space on your foamboard than you have on your box because you will be placing it on the front of your box.

Using your exacto knife, carve indents of each letter into the foamboard. You aren’t cutting out the letters, you are just making cuts into the foamboard in the shape of them so that when you paint over it there is texture where the words are. Then, cut out the shape of the foamboard that you want to place on the tombstone.

Remove any printed paper and tape, make deeper indents with your exacto knife if desired, and then glue your foamboard onto the box. After the glue has dried, mix the colors of paint that you want and paint over your tombstone. For mine, I painted over all of it with a dark gray with a purple tint, and then painted over each letter with a light purple to help them stand out. If you have sponges on hand, highlighting throughout the painting with a different color can add some interest to the piece.

Now your tombstone is complete! You just need to wait for it to dry and then display it in your home and even make a full graveyard if you want!

•Newspaper Spiderweb: 

This spider web is very similar to those paper snowflakes you made in grade school. Take this page of the newspaper and cut it into a square at the size you want your web to be. Fold it into a triangle three times. Then, fold the triangle so that it only comes to one point and has some overhang. Cut the overhang off and then cut rectangles into the folded side to be the “empty space” in the web. Unfold your web and make any adjustments you want. For extra decoration, you can easily paint or draw on your web.  Sting up your web using some washi tape and place it wherever you like in your home for some extra recycled spookiness.

•Egg Carton Spider: 

Make a spider to go along with your web! Using any kind of egg carton cut out one “bump” and then paint this whatever color you want your spider to be. While you wait for your paint to dry, cut out eight strips of construction paper about three to four inches long and one inch wide. Do an accordion fold on each strip to make the legs of the spider.

Once your paint has dried, glue on two (or eight!) googly eyes onto your spider. Then place your legs where you want them to be and glue them to the inside of the egg carton bump. Make sure to hold each leg for at least five seconds while the paint dries. Once all glue has dried, fold the foot of each leg to help your spider “stand up.” Then place your spider alongside your newspaper web you made earlier.

We want Halloween to be spooky, but the amount of plastic waste it usually generates in our landfill is a different kind of frightening. Make sure you only have fun frights this Halloween, not wasteful ones.

Amy Hartline is the recycling and education program coordinator for the Dalton-Whitfield Solid Waste Authority. Have a recycling question? Contact her at (706) 278-5001 or ahartline@dwswa.org.