Decking the Halls in Halloween!

The Halloween decorating is in full swing!  With the hallway leading to the living room decorated, the hallway going to the bedroom looked a mite bleak!  I decided something needed to be done about this!  I did not want to overdo in this area since it is not a major passage but still a cheerful bit of Halloween would be nice. The hallway is narrow so any decorations would have to be hung on the wall so as to not impede traffic.    I opted for a garland that would string from one end of the wall to the other.

Finding just the right garland would have meant trips to the store.  I hate shopping so this was just plumb out of the question!  I headed to the craftroom!  My idea was to make something homey not glitzy this time.  First I printed the words "Happy Halloween" in the largest font that I could find on the computer. I picked a font that had little spiders and cobwebs on each letter!  Woooo!  Scary!  This was printed in black on orange paper.  My letters still looked a bit small so I cut them out as circles and then backed them with slightly large black paper circles.  This helped the size a lot!  The overall circles (black and orange) were about two and a half inches in diameter.   Now to add a bit of interest and that homey touch!  I cut strips of paper from brown wrapping paper.  These strips were about eighteen inches long and maybe two inches wide.  These I pleated accordion style...all the way down the length of the paper.  Yep...all eighteen inches of teeny-tiny pleats!  I wish I could say that I had some magic pleating machine that did this tedious job for me but, alas, I did not.  It took forever to pleat seventeen strips of paper but once they were all pleated, I was good to go!  The rest of the job was simple!  With the glue gun, I hot-glued these into circles. A bit of glue along one edge, the other end stuck to the first and then a bit of glue in the center held them nicely!  My letter circles were glued onto the center of the pinwheels.  Yes...I know...Happy Halloween is only fourteen letters and I made seventeen pinwheels!  The extra three only had black circles glued to them to be used as a spacer between the words and on each end to give balance.  Once the letters were all glued to the pinwheels, the time had come to string them all together. The letters (pinwheels) were all laid on the floor in the correct order.  I started with a plain pinwheel, spelled out "Happy", placed a plain pinwheel and then spelled out "Halloween", a plain pinwheel finished the order.  I knew I had better do this since I might just get them in the wrong order and then spell something like "Hawopy NeellpHa"!  That would never work!  I chose jute string...two long strands.  By using two strands, my garland would not twist and warp as much as when only using one.  To attach the string to the pinwheels, I cut more black circles for the backs of the pinwheels.  Using the glue gun again, I merely smeared some glue to the black circle, sandwiched the two strands (about an inch apart) between the circle and pinwheel.  I held it just long enough to set the glue before moving to the next letter.  Then....ta dah!..a garland was finished and ready to be hung!

I dragged a chair from the kitchen into the hallway.  With a hammer and two tiny nails, I hung the garland about a foot and a half from the ceiling.  Only the two brads were needed as this garland is really light!  Ahhhh...my garland looked wonderful!  I was pleased with this decoration as well!  Now the hallways were both decked for the holiday!  I am almost ready!  Halloween, where are you?