I wanted to make a Halloween wreath and have my toddler help. But I also wanted it to look nice. My daughter, Ella, and Eddie Ross were my inspiration. I'd seen my daughter squeeze out a huge amount of glitter blue when I was helping her to make a little bird with google eyes. The glitter glue background that resulted when I pushed the eyeball into the glob she'd squeezed out actually looked neat. A happy accident. I have also noticed she loves google eyes and wants to glue more than just two to her art projects. Bing, an idea. Wouldn't random eyeballs look sorta cute and spooky on a halloween wreath? I thought so.
First let me give credit where credit is due. I learned how to make a wreath using glass Christmas balls on a wire hanger from following Eddie Ross's blog. Here is a link to the instructions on his site: http://www.eddieross.com/eddie_ross/2008/12/no-wire-hangers-well-maybe-just-one.html. He is awesome! I did this project with my mother last Christmas who has dementia and she was able to participate. She now has a beautiful wreath to hang on her door where she lives in a community setting.
I bought purple, orange and clear balls at the store. But, I actually underestimated how many it would take. Hence, we tweaked Eddie's idea a bit and created what might be termed a vertical type swag door decoration. I purchased a purple feathery fluffy boa type thing which already had a pocket hemmed into it. Yay! I snipped the boa into peices and slide the fluff down the hanger every few balls. I let my daughter who will be 2 soon, line up the loop at the top of each ball I handed her with the tip of the purple hanger I had undone and straightened out with a loop at the end. I was surprised, but she could do it. Her manual dexterity is amazing me each day lately. Notice, I handed her the balls to use. This caused a small melt down, but then she re-entered the game and agreed to let me pick them out. I started with the smaller balls and then went larger at the top. You can't tell from the picture...but I dropped in spider confetti on the clear balls.
Ella watched as I glued the eyeballs and more spiders and some stick on glitter Halloween related words to the swag. Then I hung it outside. She now says, "Hello weeth," each time we leave our enter our home. It's funny.
I was on a budget so I stuck the Happy Halloween lettering to a purple paint sample I had. I trimmed around it so the names of each color aren't showing. Then I glued it to a spare peice of wood (ok, a pencil...I was desperate) I had. Pencils are wood, right?
Oh, and the bow as tied and secured to a black piece of pipe cleaner. I put glue on the end and stuck it in to dry.
I didn't want to involve alot of glitter, but one idea might be to dip the bottoms of the balls in glue and cover them with appropriate colors of glitter. Or you could draw a glitter spider web.
One important note...be sure to visit this project on Eddie's site so that you can know how to keep the glass balls from popping off the holders and falling all over the place.
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