SUPPLIES
Sheet of green Styrofoam for base
Floral pins
Floral picks
Dried lemon leaves
Artificial berries, nuts, and twigs
Aritificial pears
3″ pillar candles in varying heights
Serrated knife (to cut Styrofoam)
Wire cutter (to cut picks apart)

INSTRUCTIONS
1. If your sheet of Styrofoam is not the shape or size you wish, use the serrated knife to trim it down. Bevel the top edge of the sheet so that you will have a flat surface and a 45 degree angle surfuce on which to pin the lemon leaves all around the outer rim.

2. Arrange your candles on the base how you want them and mark where they will be so you have a guide for placement of the floral supplies.

3.Using floral pins, attach individual dried lemon leaves on the bevel all the way around. Add a second layer of leaves, this time pinning them on the top and inbetween the first row. Be sure to overlap and vary the position so it has a more natural feel.

4. If your pears did not come with picks attached, poke floral picks into the bottoms of the pears and then place the pears on top of the leaves, keeping clear of t markings where the candles will sit.

5. Replace the candles and begin to fill in the spaces between the pears with the artifical berries, twigs and nuts, using floral picks and pins to secure. We don’t recommend using hot glue as it will not hold sufficiently on the base of lemon leaves.

For added sparkle to use during Christmas and the winter holidays, weave a metallic star garland in and arround the pears! Remember to never leave burning candles unattended and to not burn them further than half their height in this dried arrangement.

Simply coat Jack-Be-Littles with Mod-Podge and sprinkle glitter over them to cover and allow to dry. This is messy so be sure to wear gloves and work over newspaper. Chose glitter colors that match your decor or decorations. We chose a palette to go along with the china garden witch.

What a bright and sunny greeting this wreath makes on a door for the harvest season! And nothing could be easier. Because of our abundant wildlife and busy traffic through this door, we used artificial bits from the craft store.

Ideally, it could be made using things right from your garden. Sunflowers, an assortment of grasses and grains and some grapevine are all you need.

SUPPLIES
Grapevine wreath (or enough harvested vines to weave your own)
Grain floral bunch or picks
Berry floral bunch or picks
Sunflower floral stems
Cattails
Artificial butterflies
Floral wire
Heavy duty wire cutter (to cut bunches apart)

INSTRUCTIONS
The amount of flowers you will need depends on how big or small your wreath will be. Here, we used an existing 16″ grapevine wreath for the base, two silk sunflower stems, two artificial bunches each of wheat, goldenrod and raspberries, cattails and 2 artificial butterflies.

Vine wreath form: If you’re not using a premade grapevine wreath form, gather quite a bit of freshly harvested vine. If it is pliable enough, begin with one end and form a circle, the approximate size you want the final wreath to be. Weave the vine in and out as you work around, continually building up to a substantial thickness. If your vines are not pliable, soak them in a bath tub of warm water for a few hours.

1. With heavy duty wire cutters, cut apart the wheat bunches where they are joined together. Begin tucking the individual pieces into the wreath. Working and facing all pieces in the same direction, move around the wreath, covering the front and sides.

3. Position the sunflowers at 5 o’clock, pushing the stems up into the right side of the wreath. Use floral wire to secure in place if necessary. You want them to be secure as they will be the base on which the rest of the spray will be anchored.

4. If your goldenrod and raspberry bunches are large, cut them apart, but if they are small, tuck them in above the sunflowers and arrange so that they intermingle with one another.

5. Cut the cattails apart and position most of them in the spray above the sunflowers, trimming the stems if needed so they don’t stick out below the sunflowers. Reserve a few cattails to position around the wreath amongst the wheat, keeping them facing the same direction as the wheat.

6. Top it off with the artificial butterflies and hang.

You can create the same eerie experience for Trick-or-Treaters in your yard by using some very simple ingredients. No swamp water or eye of newt is required for this spell. Plywood and paint are the basic ingredients for working this magic trick that is easier than you may think.

We had the lumberyard cut a 4′x8′ sheet of 1″ thick plywood into eight sections measuring 16″x24″. The thick wood was used to approximate the girth of old gravestones, but you can use a thinner, less expensive, piece of plywood as well. Using some photos of old cemeteries as an example, we drew decorative tops on the pieces of wood and cut out the designs with a jigsaw and sanded all parts smooth. You can leave the tops straight, or for a simple treatment, cut the top in a semi-circular pattern (use a large plate or compass to draw the arc).

To get a stone-like effect, three shades of gray exterior house paint were used. A primer coat was applied to all sides in the darkest charcoal shade of gray. When dried, we used a piece of sea sponge to randomly sponge on a medium shade of gray flat paint, followed by another very gentle sponging using the lightest shade of gray flat paint. We did front, back and sides so that it would look as nice from the back as the front since our neighbors would be seeing the back of the graveyard.

When it came time to do the writing on the stones, we took a somewhat involved route to get a realistic effect. You can do it very simply though by painting names, birth and death dates, and spooky sayings on your stones with an artists’ paintbrush and black flat exterior paint. If you want to spend a little more time on the project, you can do some very creative things with your computer to create “stencils” that will produce eerily realistic “engravings” on your stones.

Using various fonts, we created templates in a word processor of what we wanted the finished printing to look like. For names, a font size of 160 worked well and 72 was sufficient for dates and other inscriptions. Experiment with it until you’ve found proportions that you like. Once we were satisfied, the text was printed out on card stock and then cut out with an Exacto knife. The cutting process was time-consuming because we had chosen fonts with a lot of detail. In addition to printing out text, we also used various pieces of clipart that could be enlarged. A crescent moon, skull and bat made for a great decorative touch above the names on the stones.

After many hours of painstaking cutting, we used black flat exterior paint and a stencil brush to transfer the text and images onto the stones. The cardstock templates were positioned where we wanted the engravings to be on the stones and we secured them in place with a couple of pieces of masking tape. Using the stencil brush, we painted twice by lightly dabbing the paint on and allowing 5 minutes between coats. We avoided a brushing motion so that the paint would not run behind the stencil and smear. Touch-ups were done with a small artists’
paintbrush.
To stand the gravestones up we installed two small eyehooks on the lower third of each gravestone about 6″ apart. At the hardware store we bought 24″ long metal rods that were slightly smaller than the opening in the eyehooks. The rods were hammered into the ground about 12″ and then the gravestones’ eyehooks were slid down the rod. They didn’t stand perfectly straight, but then they weren’t supposed to.

To complete the scene, we constructed a life-sized ghost. We began by pounding a 1” thick, seven-foot long bamboo stake into the ground about a foot. A hole was bored into a 10” Styrofoam ball so that it could be easily, but firmly, attached to the top of the bamboo stake.

To form the body, we filled a white, lightweight, weatherproof jacket with plastic sheeting from the hardware store. The top of the jacket was wired onto the bamboo just below the Styrofoam at the neckline. The arms were positioned as if they were reaching out to someone and wired into place.

Eight yards of two different types of white fabric completed the figure. The first piece was polyester with a nice sheen and flow. Four yards were draped over the head front-to-back and four yards side-to-side. At the arms, the fabric was pulled in and wired so you could see the arms extending out from the figure. The top layer of fabric was a translucent sheer-type fabric and was draped in the same manner, but not wired. It was attached by inserting several floral pins into the top of the head so all parts of the fabric would be free to blow in the wind.

However simple or complex you make your graveyard, the results will be frightfully chilling. In the waning hours of daylight, the free-flowing nature of the ghost adds wispy movement to your display that will make any passerby take a second glance. On a gloomy October afternoon, don’t be surprised if an unknowing stranger happens upon your yard by mistake and witnesses in awe and terror the unnatural apparition and gravestones emerging from the mists.