DIY: halloween door monster

All right. I know I wasn't sure if I was going to decorate for Halloween, but I guess the spirit of the season got the best of me and I buckled. I have officially decorated the front porch. This is the first time I've really decorated for Halloween ever in my life (and I'm not really looking forward to taking down all of that spider web either).

Unfortunately, I left my restless rocks at our old house. I'm sort of lamenting that now. They would have been so cute sitting on the front steps. Oh well. This is a new year for new things! So my initial plan involved making a wreath. Let me point you towards some amazing ideas I was using as inspiration.

First, I really loved this wreath from The Art of Doing Stuff. It's kind of, like, classy Halloween. So I put feather boas on my list. Then I spotted this wreath and loved the random monster eyeball thing. Adding eyeballs to a wreath? Easy! Finally, I thought, if all else failed, I could make this simple snake wreath. There's nothing involved with it at all. It looks like I fussed but I didn't. That's the kind of Halloween decor I like.

But then I went out looking for this stuff at cheap-o places (minus Value Village which for some reason did not occur to me at all. dumb) and I couldn't find anything. No boas. No cool looking skulls. No packages of snakes. And I was not going to Michael's without a coupon.

It was then that I was randomly searching for some sort of idea to strike when I found myself staring at wigs. Superstore had some of them out of the packaging and the way they were dangling from peg hooks made it look like each wig was a little monster.

Do you remember Cousin It from the Adam's Family? Well, that's exactly what popped into my mind.

So I thought I could possibly get the eyeballs glued on and it would look like a little hair monster hanging on my door. I'm not lying when I say I got really excited and drove way out of my way to get supplies. I could have waited for the weekend, but I just didn't want to! This was so much more fun than anything else I could have planned that day. And unfortunately, neither Superstore or the Dollar Store had bags of eyeballs and I really needed a bag of eyeballs. (I never thought I'd ever say that in a million years.)

If you want the basic monster like I've done, this whole project is going to cost you about $10 (as long as you already own a glue gun).

These steps are just to give you a general idea of what I did. It's not necessarily what you must do, but I thought it worked best. Also let's not forget that this is a monster and monsters can look however you want them to look. Maybe you want one eyeball. Maybe you want to take the Cousin It thing seriously and just stick some sunglasses on there. Choose a different wig. There are short ones, black ones, blue ones. Cut the hair if you feel it needs it. You know. Whatever. Have fun with it. That's the point of Halloween, right?

Get your wig out of the packaging and let it breathe for a day or so. I found that since mine had been folded up, it was crinkled in the middle and looked odd. Try it on a few times. Get your husband to try it on. Heck, have everyone in your household try it on and laugh and laugh. Then put it somewhere to get the kink out (if it has any). I used a post on the stairs and put it on that (like the post was wearing it. Laugh some more). Once it's starting to look like a wig and not a weird folded piece of hair, find something to stuff in the head portion just to fill it out a bit. I used some t-shirt scraps.

Then I used some coordinating thread and quickly stitched the bangs to the bottom portion of the elastic head part (I do not know the technical term). Basically, just have it so the bangs are folded down and hiding the stuffing and the mesh as best you can. The stitching doesn't have to be perfect and it definitely won't be. This was the most tricky part because you're moving thread and needle around hair bits, but trust me, the hair will eventually hide whatever horrendous stitches you put in there (just don't stitch the hair down!).

Fluff out the bangs to cover everything and you should have something like this.

Next, decide how you want his "face" to look. While your glue gun heats up, figure out where you want to put the eyes (if you're using them) and how many eyeballs you want to use. Then put a dollop of glue on the back of each eye, hold the hair out of the way, and stick them firmly down onto the mesh netting under the hair. Once they're in place, you can arrange the hair around them to make them look a little more natural. Or as natural as eyeballs on a wig can look.

If you want, you can add other things like spiders or some bits of webbing. You could add bows or braid some of the hair. You could even get some black hair dye and change the hair up, too. Black streaks or even bleached bits would look neat. Chop into the bangs to give him an asymmetrical look. You're only limited to your imagination and how far you want to take your monster. 

Finally, hang it! The mesh that holds the hair on is the perfect hanging thing. Just push it onto your door hook or tie some string through the mesh to use as a hanger. Obviously, I'm without the use of my peephole until Halloween's over, but I'm cool with that (actually, I found that if I put my finger on the peephole and just wiggled the hair around it, I could still kinda see through it without the monster looking split open around the peephole. So it's not totally unusable).

Also, I've finally accepted the fact that nothing I hang on my door is photogenic. I can take a bazillion pictures of it, but it's always going to look weird and out of focus, and the door will always look wonky. Therefore, this is the best out of a bazillion photos and I really don't want to take any more. I'll just swear it looks better than this.

Don't forget to decorate the rest of your house accordingly. 

Full disclosure: Initially, I was just going to do the door monster and I wasn't going to put spider web all over the porch, but my neighbour happened to put all of her Halloween decorations out the same day, and... I know it's not a competition, but I just thought that I could do so much better. Anyone can push a fake tombstone into their lawn, you know? So I may or may not have spent an hour gingerly pulling spider web all around the porch trying to make it look "real."

I may or may not have wished I had picked up some better looking spiders, too.

One last note. The bag of eyeballs gives you way more eyeballs than you'll probably need (depending on monster species). I just stuck my extras into a jar. That's where extra eyeballs go, right?