Art Ideas, Kid Stuff
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Haunted House Props! DIY

Our annual haunted house is just around the corner and we’re very busy getting ready for it! This year we’ve made a lot of changes to our haunted house which means we needed to create a whole new set of props and sets. We’re going to have a fortune teller, which obviously means we need a fortune teller booth! We bought the “children market stand” from Ikea and transformed it into a glitzy fortune teller booth. This was a straight forward DIY with a lot of painting, gluing and adding sparkles.

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Next on our list was to make some more eerie ghosts for our haunted cave (new this year)! We bought paper mache masks from Michaels. We then painted them white, both the outside and inside of the mask. Once the mask were dry we draped cheese cloth over the mask and then just put a thin layer of podgy  over the cheese cloth (just on the surface of the mask).

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Our last project for this week was making  books. We want to hang the books in our haunted classroom and make them appear as though they are floating. So, yes we could have saved ourselves all the trouble of making the books and used real ones however, they would be too heavy to hang from the ceiling on fishing string. So we put in the extra hours.

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Materials

Cardboard

Black Paint

Hot Glue

Book Covers (can be taken from the internet and printed)

Mod Podge

Exacto Knife

Directions

1) Using an exacto knife cut out a piece of cardboard for your book. The trick is to find a piece that is the length of your book when it is lying open. You can bend the cardboard in the middle to make the spine of the book.

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2) Measure out 3 pieces of cardboard, two pieces are the length of the top and bottom of the book and one is the length of the height of the book. Paint them white or yellow and let them dry. Once dry, using a black pen, draw lines on the pieces (to look like the pages).

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3) Using hot glue, glue your pieces into place.

4) Paint the entire book one colour

5) Print out a  cover for your book and use Podgy to glue it onto the cover of the book.

We also chose to make some of our books open. We used two different methods for this. The first method was with styrofoam and the second we used cardboard. We just played around with this to get the look we were after however, we welcome any suggestions or ideas on how to make open books. Stay tuned for more photos and projects!

This entry was posted in: Art Ideas, Kid Stuff

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Nikki is the owner/director of Seasons Family Centre. She completed a diploma in photography at Fanshawe College, followed by a degree in psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Shortly after she finished a post-graduate diploma at the Toronto Art Therapy Institute. She is a Registered Canadian Art Therapist. Over the next few years she extended her education through various courses in psychology, counselling and play therapy at George Brown College, Hincks Delcrest and Cross Country Education. For the past several years Nikki has been running art programs all across the city of Toronto at various schools, community centres, libraries and private homes. She also runs play therapy groups at Thorncliffe Neighbourhood Offices as well as private art therapy sessions. Nikki has taken several courses in baking and cake decorating through the Wilton certification program.

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