Black and White Halloween Mantel

I am not a fan of Halloween. I honestly don’t get the holiday. I have never decorated for Halloween. My kids tease me about not liking it and wonder why. I told them when they had kids they would understand :) So it came as quite the surprise to them (and myself) when out of now where I decided to decorate a little this year. And what surprised me even more, is that I really like my black and white Halloween mantel!

I wanted to decorate, but since I don’t like the holiday, so I didn’t want to spend very much. I bought the plastic skull for a few dollars and the black netting for a couple more. I made the spiders, and made the spell print myself too. Engineer prints of that size are less than $2. My big splurge was the set of crows from amazon. I think they were $14.

My kids had so much fun helping me gather items like the branch for the crow and all the black books from off our shelves.

I used brownish yellow watercolor paint to make the witches spell look aged. I used a glue gun and wire to make the large and all the small spiders.

I liked the black and white Halloween mantel so much I decided to do a spooky gallery wall too! I took photographs of all of us and then tried to make them look like creepy old photos in photoshop.

I am a little disappointed that is doesn’t translate well in the photos. It looks better in real life. The spiders just look like little black dots, but in person you can tell they are spiders even from standing across the room. One of the empty frames even has an elaborate web I made from glue gun strands but you can’t see it in the photos. I guess you will all just have to come over :)