The Halloween Tree

Last month my in-laws, aka Mom & Dad, were handed down a beautiful curio cabinet. In order to put that gorgeous piece in their dining room, they needed to retire their faux money tree. Lucky for me, before taking anything to Put & Take, they usually ask me if I could find any use for their retired items. Seeing that with a little modification it could turn into a cool Halloween prop, I gladly took it, and that is how the story of “The Halloween Tree” started…

Here is the before picture of the retired faux tree.

In our home, black and red are generally the main colors of our Halloween themes. So after taking the leaves out I started spray painting the tree black. When I finished with the painting I put the tree aside for 5 days for the paint to dry properly and start curing.

The following weekend I carried the tree inside and gathered all the bits and bobs that I wanted to use on the tree: spiders, centipedes, black roses, eyeballs, black leaves, Spanish moss etc. By the way, all these things were from the Dollar Store and cost me only 7 dollars.

I started with hot gluing the spiders and centipedes to the tree. Then I did some touch ups with black craft paint at the places where hot glue blobs wouldn’t blend.

When all the creepy-crawlies were glued on the tree, I modified the roses by hot gluing some plastic eyeballs in the center of the flowers.

After attaching the single-eyed roses here and there, I added the black leaves and some webbing.

Although I had more eyeballs and roses in hand, I only used 8 roses. Same thing with the webbing… some here and some there.

You don’t want to overdo anything, because if you do, the tree loses that weird funny-spooky feel to it.

With all the bits and bobs attached, the Halloween Tree was finished. But I needed to make it a bit more stable so it wouldn’t fall on anyone when touched. So I placed it in a bigger flower pot and tightly filled the gaps with crumbled paper.

After getting the tree nice and stable, I hot glued some Spanish moss at the bottom part of the tree to finish up the project.

As a final touch I placed a Dollar Store rat and a creepy spider on the mossy area.

Here is our spooktacular Halloween Tree in all its glory.

Mom & Dad visited us last night and guess what? They couldn’t recognize their tree and asked me where I got it from. That question alone told me that it was a great transformation.

The eyes on the tree remind me of Rose from Monster Inc. movie: “I’ll be watching you! Aalwaaays watching!”

Handan, xo