Haunted House Cloche

This is a sponsored post on behalf of FloraCraft®. As always, all project ideas and opinions are my own.
I love adding new pieces to my holiday decor each year. This year has been a little slow, and I haven't gotten much done. But one of the projects I did complete is one I've wanted to do ever since I bought this cloche a year or two ago. It's so tall and skinny, I always thought it would be PERFECT to hold a haunted house at Halloween! And thanks to FloraCraft®, and their inspirational Halloween E-Book (which is FREE to download, by the way!) I am able to mark that project from the to do list.

What was holding me back from making this haunted house in the past was figuring out what media to use. Paper is my go to, but it would need to be 3-D to stand up under the cloche. Enter FloraCraft Make It: Fun® Foam! And the example haunted houses from the Halloween booklet.

Basic supplies:
12"x36" FloraCraft Make It: Fun® Foam Sheet
3" FloraCraft Make It: Fun® Foam Disk
Haunted house pattern
Foam Cutter and Foam Tools

The Halloween E-Book is so awesome that it comes with haunted house patterns, but I designed my own since I need it to fit in a certain space. I drew it out on a piece of construction paper and made sure it would fit inside my cloche.

I cut out the house then used it as a template to trace on the foam. I also sketched out where I wanted my windows to go. Cover your work surface with some newspaper to collect the foam mess. Carefully carve out the house and the windows. The Foam Cutter makes this super simple!

Cut off a third of one of the 3" disks then spray paint it and the house black. 2 coats should cover them nicely.

I used Zip Dry glue to adhere the disk to the back base of the haunted house and wrapped a rubber band around it while it dried. I also cut pieces of crinkled white tissue paper to cover the back of the windows, and glued them down with the Zip Dry.

Time to decorate the roof! I cut a 1 ¾" strip of glitter cardstock then used a scallop punch along one side. The underside of the glitter paper is white, so I colored the areas that could be seen later with a black Sharpie.

Use a score board or fold the scalloped edge at a right angle. This will hang over in front of the haunted house from the roof. Also score where the top of the roof will be.

Use your adhesive to glue the glitter paper to the roof areas of the haunted house.

Where the top story of the house juts out, cut off the glitter paper up to the fold of the scalloped edge between the two orange arrows.

I also flipped out the edges of the roof to add to the whimsy of the haunted house.

Time to light it up!

I really wanted to use glow sticks for this because 1) they are super inexpensive and can be "turned on" and left all night and 2) I can change up the colors if I want (green! orange! purple! pink!).

You need 2 glow sticks and can insert them directly into the disk at the base of the back of the house. Angle them so they cover all of the windows. That's it! You don't need to do anything else to them. When the lights die, simply pull them out and add new ones.

And look at that glow!!

So here is the final completed haunted house itself. You can see that it stands up perfectly all on it's own. Now to add it to the cloche and a few final touches!

I added a black bottle brush tree, some purple "grass" and little skulls to the base. Then I topped it all of with a few cobwebs.

I also added a few of my vinyl bats to the outside of the cloche for an extra spooky effect.

I just love how the haunted house cloche turned out! And I love that I can easily change the backlit color if I choose to do so. This is definitely an awesome addition to my Halloween decor this year! And I think I'll be making a special spot for this little beauty on the mantel pretty soon. Keep an eye out on my Instagram to see how it turns out!

Be sure to download your FREE copy of the 2015 Halloween E-Book! There are some seriously cute ideas in there. I'll be creating more for sure.