Home, Spooky Home

A row of goblins welcomes trick-or-treaters to your door.

Black paper silhouettes in a window look amazing -- and they're super-easy to make.

Mini pumpkins are the perfect size for making scary spiders.

Invite kids to help themselves to these mini buckets-o'-treats perched on an eerie black tree.

Hang a row of cute felt-covered witch hats on your front porch.

Put away the knife and decorate your front-door pumpkins with things from the craft closet: glitter, rhinestones, masks, and more.

Forget the treat bowl: Store your candy inside a wide-grinned pumpkin instead.

A black marker, fluorescent-green foam circles, and some double-stick tape turn trees into mysterious lawn creatures.

Instant face-lift -- set your pumpkin on its side and use the stem as the nose.

You'll be the most popular house on the block!

Paint a creepy haunted mansion on a pumpkin and carve out the windows and a full moon behind it.

Make a menagerie of cats to line your stoop. Create ears by cutting triangles out of colorful card stock and tape them to toothpicks. Leave enough room at the bottom of the toothpick so that you can poke it into the pumpkin to hold the ears in place. Paint on the background color and face details and poke the ears in place once dry.

Give pumpkins "hair" with autumnal flowers or a swath of greens.

These cute little guys can be made with old socks!

Bend a handle out of thick wire or a clothes hanger and use it to hang small jack-o-lanterns along an outdoor path.

Make a spooky candy dish with plastic water bottles, gauze, and googly eyes.

Use a stamp or a stencil to add a big black spider to a pumpkin side, and instead of the usual eyes and mouth, carve in the spider's sticky web.

Inside, make a spooky family tree by cutting a tree shape out of black paper and affixing "family" silhouettes to the branches. Is that a witch in your family tree?

Copyright &copy 2008 Meredith Corporation. Originally published in the October 2007 issue of Parents magazine.