an easy Halloween craft

Molly and I made this banner last Saturday when it was very stormy out.  It was one of those dark kind of days when you need the lights on and a candle that smells like apple cider spices burning.  See? I’m setting the ambiance for you…don’t you feel like crafting something?

We started with wooden letters I bought at Hobby Lobby—they come two in a pack and every six weeks or so go on sale for 50% off.  Have you ever stood in the wooden letter aisle and thought about all the great words you could spell out and hang on the wall?  How about like “TRUTH” or “READ” or “DORK” (get out of the aisle).

These are the letters in case you don’t know what unpainted wooden letters look like.  Look, I picked N and Y.  Do you like New York?  Me too, especially NYC at Christmas time.  But I also like the Catskill area, though I’m sad Catskill Game Farm is closed even though some of the animals looked a little sketchy.  They had old vintagey playground equipment.  My husband owns cows that are on a farm near Cooperstown NY.  He loves cow genetics and reads lots of stuff about cow data and subscribes to  many magazines that look like cow porn.   And that is all I will share about NY and my husband and his cows.

I notice all the good blogs show lots of pictures with every step in detail.  Would you have liked it if I took pictures in Hobby Lobby while I was buying the letters?  Then of me driving home and stopping to eat a taco? 

Well… we painted the letters black and then using decoupage glue we glittered them with Martha’s hematite glitter. 

I highly recommend Martha’s glitter over any other stuff.  I often use my 40% off coupon at Michael’s on Martha glitter.  I like glitter.

There is a clerk at our local Michael’s that has really big hair.  This is one of those Texan things I love, how do those ladies get their hair so big?  What do they look like when they wake up?  Do they ever lose stuff then find it in their hair later?

After we glittered the letters and let them dry we strung orange and black beads and hot glued the letters to some hemp twisted cord (that we separated into single strands) from the jewelry dept.  When we were done, as you can see, we hung it crookedly above our breakfast nook.