Time and money saving DIY Halloween ideas

By Stacie Gaetz

Holidays are expensive. Even more so with the prices of seemingly everything skyrocketing lately.
So how can you have a happy Halloween without breaking the bank?
The good news is, there are a number of ways to reuse things you already have or source them affordably from dollar stores or thrift stores.
You can cover everything from disturbing decor to creative costumes to freaky food on a budget (and without a ton of work).

Decor
The No. 1 way to DIY Halloween decor (and entertain your kids for a few minutes) is by letting them create some creepy crafts. Whether they make it out of construction paper, carboard, felt, wood or any other material, they can manufacture spooky creatures and hang them in your house or windows.
Want your home to resemble a witch’s kitchen? Create your very own “magic” bottles with a clear container of any kind, some toys or food, water and food colouring. Make essence of lizard or dinosaur with some small plastic toys, worm water with gummy worms or severed fingers with hot dogs.
What could be more Halloween than a bowl full of monsters on your table? This one is as simple as it gets. Buy some eggplant, gourds. broccoli, kiwis, ginger, coconut, avocados, kiwano or any other fun shaped food you can think of and add googly eyes.
Another idea that couldn’t be easier is making your family photos eerie. Add construction paper witch’s hats, cotton cobwebs and plastic spiders, tissue ghosts and rubber bats to your photo galleries and picture frames to frighten up your family. If you are a bit more ambitious, take some photos of your kids in spine-chilling poses, print them off in black and white or sepia and temporarily replace your family photos with the new ghoulish versions.
There are countless ways to make an affordable Halloween wreath. A foam wreath spray painted black and then wound with white string makes a great spiderweb. Glue black feathers and a fake crow to the same wreath for a decoration Edgar Allen Poe would approve of. Get sweet by gluing candy to a wreath. You can use anything from candy corn to lollipops. Get frightening by poking pins through rubber ball eyes and stabbing them into a foam wreath. Make a mysterious mummy by wrapping the wreath in white fabric and adding some googly eye peeking out.
With these additions your house will be the most hair-raising Halloween home on the block.

Costumes
One of the easiest DIY Halloween costumes is one our family has used more than once. All you need is a black t-shirt, a white tank top and face paint (if you choose to use it). Cut strips out of the white tank top to look like ribs and put it on overtop of the black t-shirt, add some black and white face paint and voila – you are a scary skeleton!
Add a little color to the mix by creating a rainbow and pot of gold. Run colored tape down the arms of a blue long-sleeved shirt in a rainbow pattern. Then spray paint a pot gold.
Get into the season by putting one of your kids in a black shirt with a white P and the other in a white shirt with a black S, add a colander to each of their heads as a hat and they are salt and pepper.
Transform your kiddo into a mad scientist with one of dad’s white button up shirts, a stethoscope from a doctor’s kit and some test tubes and beakers from a science kit.
Any red shirt or jacket can change into a ladybug with black construction paper dots. Add a headband with pipe cleaners and pom poms for antenna.
Speaking of pom poms, adding some in every color to a white shirt can make you an instant bubble gum machine. Feel free to add a 25-cent sign to top it off.
Dress your child all in green and then glue three foam balls to a headband (as eyes) for a Martian.
Dress your child all in gold and have them hold their favorite sports equipment (spray-painted gold) and they are a trophy in that sport.
Got a striped red and white shirt? Add a matching toque and some black glasses and you have Where’s Waldo.
Choose your favorite M&M color, wear a shirt that reflects it and tape a white M to the front – How sweet it is!

Food
Every holiday has its signature foods that goes with it, but Halloween is the one you can have the most fun with.
If you are like me, you may think that you are not creative enough or a good enough cook to make an exciting Halloween themed spread but there are many things that are little to no more effort than serving the food how you normally would.
Make eyes out of deviled eggs with the addition of an olive and some spicy mayo “bloodshot”.
Get creative with how you lay out your cheese on your homemade pizza for a tasty spiderweb, ghosts, mummy or jack-o-lantern.
Pigs in a blanket can be easily transformed into severed fingers in bandages with some cheese nails.
Cut any kind of sandwich into Halloween shapes like ghosts, bats, jack-o-lanterns, monsters or more.
Create poisonous candy apples by using twigs as a stick. Dip them in black liquid candy for a different look or go for white chocolate and add edible eyes for apple ghosts.
No Halloween would be complete without bugs in dirt (gummy worms in chocolate pudding topped with cookie crumbles).
Make your veggie tray spooky by laying it our as any number of creepy shapes – a skeleton, a spider, monster – the possibilities are limitless.
Graveyard taco dip comes together with your favorite dip recipe, taco chip gravestones (don’t forget to write RIP with edible marker) and add “grass” with some green onions.
Jack-o-lantern quesadillas are a fun treat. Just cut the face out of the tortillas before sandwiching them together.
For a healthier option, make fruit frightening. Bananas become ghosts with chocolate chip eyes, peeled oranges transform into pumpkins with a green apple stem, with the right shades of food coloring and some white chocolate, strawberries become candy corn. Pretty much any fruit can be easily cut into fun shapes like coffins, skulls or ghosts.
Halloween doesn’t have to be expensive to be fun. Work together as a family to decide what vision you want for your haunted home and get to it with a little creativity and a lot of creepy.