Decorate your home for Halloween

What could be more fun than dressing up your house with fabulous Halloween decorations? Tie the festive decor together by using a spider theme throughout. You can make all these creepy-crawly projects with basic craft materials. Happy Halloween!

Dress up pumpkins with spray paint and stencils

Skip the sharp knives and candles. Stamp a spider shape on paper and copy it in varying sizes on a photocopier (spider stamp, $6; www.jffstamps.com). Cut out the shapes, trace them on contact paper and stick them to a pumpkin surface. Spray-paint the entire pumpkin, and then peel off the spiders to reveal the orange underneath. Create the reverse effect—black spiders on orange or spray-painted pumpkins—by sticking the removed spider cutouts onto pumpkins. Use artificial pumpkins and keep them for next year (from $14, depending on size; www.funkins.com).

Hang gigantic crawling spiders outside your home

Make the spiders on a large sheet of black paper by tracing an oval platter for the body and a salad plate for the head. Then draw the legs freehand and cut out the shape. Using double-sided tape, stick knotted pieces of yarn to your front door to string together a web.