Decorating With Dave

Dave Ramsey isn’t a woman, and if he were I might just be 100% on board with his plan.  I’m about to be barfingly sexist, so hold onto your moral…
If he were a woman, he’d have an entire section in each of his books regarding home decor and how to successfully integrate it into his plan.
Besides, Decorating With Dave sounds so crisp.

Anyway, my cute kids have been begging me for WEEKS to get ready for Halloween. At first I thought they were talking about their costumes, so I explained that we weren’t going to be wearing costumes for a few weeks, but after a while I caught on: they wanted a SPOOKY house.
“If you can get the living room all picked up before you go to school,” I said to my daughter, “Then we will decorate when you get home.”
The kids and I sat on Pinterest for about half an hour getting ideas. I thought it was a good idea until my kids started pointing to all the Martha Stewartesque porches and mantels and saying, “Let’s make our house like THAT!”
Their eyes fairly sparkled.

What we came up with wasn’t too bad, far from Martha tho’ it be. We decorated from 4 pm until after 9. Well, the kids gave up somewhere around 6:30, but two and a half hours is a pretty good run for little kids.
I drew a couple of bats on some white computer paper and used them as stencils for these:

I cut the bats out of black card stock and folded their wings in a little. The kids helped me tape them to the wall, and they were so thrilled. They giggled.
“Dad’s going to be like, ‘AH! Bats!’… so spooky,” my daughter said.
I should also mention that we were listening to my kid’s Halloween station on Pandora -the kids were in heaven.
For a few months, I’ve been saving empty glass bottles because I’ve been wanting to make my own apothecary collection. I didn’t know if it would turn out, but it did! I soaked the bottles in a bowl filled with hot, soapy water (with some ammonia added). The labels scrubbed right off.
The kids painted the bottles, I printed the labels from THIS site, and then I used adhesive spray to attach them (I stuffed what little I had left of my burlap in the tops of the jars because I don’t keep corks on hand  Maybe I should start…). This was my son’s favorite feature.
“Is there poison in there?” He kept asking. Should I be worried?

It’s not the best picture, but you get the idea.
I have had some blocks of wood on hand, so I had the kids paint them black. My son helped me sand the edges after they had dried. My daughter helped me rip pages out of a book.
I used a glue stick to attach ripped up book pages to computer paper, and then I printed one letter on each page.
After they came out of the printer, I ripped (instead of cut) the letter out. I chalked the edges with soft pastel black chalk and modpodged them to a block. THIS is my favorite craft of the night! I didn’t have any cute Halloweenish paper to print on, so I made my own out of an old book.
I swear my house is turning into a morbid sort of book slaughter house.

The font I used is a circus font that I downloaded for free from dafont.com (Thanks, Brittany, for recommending that site to me! I love it so much).
I also pulled apart a dead tomato plant that never actually made it from the store to our garden. Wal-Mart sold us a huge tomato plant at 70% off because the tips of it had frozen in a late freeze. We were going to bring it home and trim it up nice and plant it.
But we only got as far as bringing it home. Yesterday I ripped it apart. I’m going to use the dead tomato plant branches in another project, but I had the kids paint the bottom pot black.
My daughter found two HUGE sticks.
I thanked my husband for not weeding the farthest back corner of our yard because I used the weeds (and blue duct tape that I hid with fabric) to make brooms:

The chalkboard is something I made for a Primary Project. It’s just the back of a picture frame (the part that holds the picture in and has brackets on the back. Does that make any kind of sense?). The frame to the picture broke, but I’ve had the glass and back to it in my closet for a couple of years. I ALMOST threw them out last month… good thing I didn’t!!!
I painted it up!! It worked perfect for a WITCHY sign.
And here’s the mess after I cleaned half of it up:

The white butcher paper was the perfect base for our mess. Before heading to bed last night, I slathered a huge portion of it in black paint. Today, I’m going to cut a huge owl out of it and hang it up in the kids’ bedroom window.

Notice there’s no pictures of us actually crafting together (or any step-wise instructions).  My hands were generally covered in crap the entire time we sped-crafted.

The cost for everything we did yesterday? $0!!
Does anyone have Dave’s number? I’d like to text him.  I’m pretty sure he’d text back a picture of a gold star, or something.