Halloween Door Hanger Project and Free Printables

At last it’s chilly here in LA (in the morning at least) and starting to feel Fall-ish….or as Fall-ish as Southern California gets….I’m wearing shorts……

Anyway, it’s helped with my Halloween thinking.  So, with the assistance of the invaluable Graphics Fairy along with some fun fonts from DaFont I threw together a quick, easy, Halloween Door hanger that I thought might be fun if you haven’t done all your decorating already.  And the best part, it cost about $4.00!

You will need:

• Scrap wood cut to size (any thickness will do, mine happened to be ¾”)
• A candle
• Flat black paint
• A sander or just plain sand paper
• Mod Podge (I used both Matte Mod Podge and Outdoor Modpodge for this project.)
• Eye hooks
• Wire
• Printables

I came up with these designs using graphics from the aforementioned Graphics Fairy and a couple of free clip art images.

Here are all the graphics along with the two backgrounds in case you wanted to do your own thing.  If I’ve done it right you should be able to click on them and then save them as a JPEG to print out.

I cut my scrap wood down to 10.5” by 3” strips

….and let’s say it all together shall we?….” rubbed my candle along the edges!” (Cheltenham Road: where good ideas go to be beaten into the ground!) and then painted over it with flat black latex paint.

(The candle lays down a barrier between the raw wood and the top coat of paint and the paint won’t stick to the candle wax.  So, when you sand the edges in the next step you reveal the wood beneath and end up with an antiqued/aged look. You can see a full tutorial and explanation in this post I did on making chippy wood letters)

After the paint had dried a quick sanding gave me that slightly antiqued edge.

I then Mod Podged the graphics into place and, after they dried, trimmed and sanded the edges slightly and sealed them with a coat of Outdoor Mod Podge.

After that I put a mark 1″ in from each corner and drilled pilot holes (pilot holes are particularly important if you’re dealing with old, scrap wood – it prevents the wood from splitting).

I wired them together and my front door immediately took on a festive, fall Halloween vibe.

Now, if I can manage to look welcoming while keeping most of the candy for myself…………

Further thoughts:

I’m not crazy about the wire hanger.  I think a black rope or something would be better and painting the eye screws black would be cool too.

I wanted to use hooks and eyes (rather than wire) which I thought would be easy to come by.  However, by thinking that I, of course, immediately invoked the David Law whereby things that you’ve seen before and seem quite common and attainable suddenly cease to exist.  This happens regularly.  I don’t mean to be egocentric but I’m pretty sure that, at some point in my childhood I uttered the phrase “Oh, I’ll go pick you up a Unicorn – they’re everywhere” which lead to their immediate disappearance from the planet.

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