Sugar Skull Lights Tutorial

Every year it seems like the selection at Halloween gets a little more cutesy and cheap looking.  This years motto seems to be cover it with glitter and call it good, well that’s not good enough for me! I should note that sugar skulls are a Day of the Dead decoration, but here at my house the Halloween and Day of the Dead decorations over lap.You will need:

• Inexpensive skull lights – I found mine in the “Dollar Spot” in Target, although they cost $2.50
• Puffy paint in a selection of colors, I used regular, pearl, and glitter
• 1 yd. of fabric, mine is black with multicolored dots

Helpful extras – Q-tips, paper towels, and an empty egg carton. Start by taking the skull covers off of the lights, the ones I had just pulled off.Using puffy paint, decorate each skull. I kept it pretty simple, outlining the lips, adding eye shadow/eye lashes, rouge, and hair. If you make a mistake use a Q-tip to clean up the line or wipe the paint off with a paper towel and start over. I only decorated the fronts, the back side will be hidden by the fabric fringe. I set them in an egg carton and allowed them to dry a few hours.While the paint was drying I cut my fabric. My fabric was 44” wide, I folded it into quarters and cut one inch wide strips with my ruler and rotary cutter from selvage to selvage. I cut each 1” wide strip into forth's, making each strip about 11” long (so I left the strips folded and cut the folds).
Next I used a larks head knot to attach the strips to the cord of lights. I used 12 strips between each light, for a nice full garland.Once the skulls are dry put them back on the lights and your ready to hang up your new lights! There are a lot of different ways to vary this project, for example:

• make the fabric strips shorter and tie them on for a fluffier garland
• make all the skulls the same
• use food coloring tinted Mod Podge to color the skulls before adding the designs
• use a variety of scrap fabrics for a shabby chic look
• use ribbon or yarn to decorate the garland instead of fabric

If you make one of these garlands share a link with us, I’d love to see what you come up with!

Day of the Dead Figurines

I know the Day of the Dead is a different holiday than Halloween, but since we are big skeleton fans the decorations overlap for us. I wish I could take credit for this idea, but I found it over at the Anticraft, they have a lot of great alternative craft projects, make sure to check out their archives! I have been wanting to try this project for a while, so I have collected several different figurines. This one is from the dollar tree, for a dollar I figured it would be a good one to start with. The good news it that if I mess up I can just repaint them black. I have three others waiting to be painted, but I need to wait until my little “helpers” are in bed before I start working on these, the wings are going to be “boney” too!

I also hit the jackpot today at Hancock Fabrics, their Project Runway fabric was on clearance, over half off the original price!!! I stocked up, they won’t be getting more and this fabric is perfect for the craft room.I’m planning window shades, a new ironing board cover, sewing machine cozy, crate covers, and who knows what else, yeah I got a lot of fabric.