Happy Halloween everyone! Hope you’ve been having a spooky and spectacular haunted holiday! I just wanted to let you know I learned from last year’s round of Halloween fails. This year, I took a new tack on DIY home decor with some super easy Halloween decorations I couldn’t mess up if I tried.

Last year, I think I tried to do to much all at once… and it all kind of looked half-reared and sad. This year, and going forward, I’m taking a one thing at a time approach to holiday decorating.

My goal is to make one really cool thing for each holiday, and be limited to buy 1 or 2 really cool decorations at the store. It may seem super minimal right now, but if we’re taking the time to make something special, and we’re holding off on going crazy shopping for a ton of decorations…

Over time, we’ll have a whole house full of fun memories and eclectic holiday decorations.

Check out what we did this year!

Easy Halloween Decorations – Spooky Centerpiece

All I needed to pull off this look was a dollar store severed hand (please don’t use a real one), stuck in a vase full of skulls we already had from last year.

New this year is the little spiderweb bandana underneath, and the paper ghost that Phil made with his Grandma.

Super fast. Super easy. Super cool looking.

DIY Home Decor – Hand Drawn Halloween Pumpkins

I had a spark of inspiration when we went to Hobby Lobby a couple of weeks ago, and high tailed it to the craft pumpkins. I was thinking… what if we bought a couple every year, and let the kids do something creative with them? Sign and date the bottom and in 20 years you’ve got a whole Halloween house full of happy memories of times you got to unplug with your kids and just make stuff.

Phil was WAY on board with this idea, and proceeded to draw what is probably the cutest mad face I’ve ever seen in my life.

Let him tell you about his mad faced pumpkin himself:

It’s been so much fun this year with Halloween – Phil was into the whole thing last year… but this year he is Halloween obsessed. And he was having so much fun drawing on his pumpkin, he just couldn’t stop with a couple of faces. We drew for at least an hour on our craft pumpkins, and I totally love the results.

His pumpkin may look like random scribbles made by an over-excited toddler… but every single mark had a purpose in his artwork. Listening to Phil talk about what he was drawing… this kid just made his muhmuh so dang proud.

I drew on a craft pumpkin, too – spider webs, ghosts, spiders, bats in a night sky… it’s one of those all over designs you gotta hold in your hand and turn around to see the whole thing. I don’t get a ton of time for personal art projects these days, and I had a lot of fun with this. Just doodling spooky things that had no chance of going through any rounds of revisions… it’s refreshing.

Joy did her own pumpkin, too! I braved the mess and squirted some acrylic paint onto a paper towel, mushed her hands in it and slapped em on the sides of her pumpkin. She really, really, really wanted to paint more stuff.

Maybe next year.

Did you make any Halloween crafts this year?

What did you make? Go ahead and show off a little – if you posted pics online I wanna see links!