Family Craft Night: Haunted Houses
I found this amazing haunted house cut file from TeamKnK.com and immediately wanted to use it at the library.
UPDATE: It seems to be deactivated, so h ere is pdf:the
For our October Family Craft Night, patrons were invited to come decorate and assemble the haunted house treat bags.
How To Details Once I uploaded the files onto the library's Cricut, I ungrouped the image. Then I enlarged the house (just the house, not the inserts) to 10.6"x16.54". I got black poster board and trimmed it down to fit onto the 12x24 cut mat, and I made 30 of these babies.
The house inserts I did on several different colors of cardstock. I did yellow, purple, orange, pink, green, and blue. They were sized at 6.43"x6.85".
After I posted some pictures on our Facebook page, a lot of interest in the craft generated so I had to do a registration (although I typically don't for the monthly Family Craft Nights). It filled in a little under 4 hours. Good times!
Decorations Metallic markers looked great on the haunted houses! I had 3 packs distributed around the room when we were doing the craft. I highly recommend Crayola Metallic Markers, but Bic Metallic Permanent Markers work well too.
I had some Halloween cut files from Shadow Puppet Night that I used the Cricut to scale down to 1.5" or 2" in height. These were done on different colors of cardstock, to be glued onto the haunted houses. There were zombies, werewolves, vampires, cats, witches, and ghosts.
The trees were a little larger. I scaled the height to either 3.5" or 3.919" for trees. I also found some appropriately-sized Halloween stickers at Wal-Mart that could be used when decorating the houses.
At the event, I had guests decorate their houses first, then fold and glue them. It was easier to glue and draw on them when they were still flat. Once the haunted house was decorated and assembled, we added some thin ribbon for handles.
Another option I had (that no one actually did) was to use tissue paper instead of the cardstock insert. Stick an LED tea light in there and you've got a cute little Halloween decoration.
The smaller, blue version was my first haunted house. A practice version.
Here are a few examples from our lovely patrons:
I took my niece one to do at home because she's Library VIP. She called it her "Halloween purse."
Back of mine. Skeleton lost his head.