Fun Halloween Lantern Decorations

I love all of the fun and easy lighted Halloween crafts that you can make for the holiday.  These ideas can be used to decorate the inside and outside of your home to welcome trick or treaters.  Use these ideas as a starting point and then personalize each one to give it your own twist.  This way you can make friendly, or spooky, Halloween decorations to fit your style.

Halloween Lanterns

Image Source: frykitty on Flickr CC 2.0

You can make pretty Halloween lanterns and displays using milk cartons, or by simply building your own design using cardboard and paper.  Here are a few ideas for how to create your own Halloween Lanterns or decorations using milk cartons.

1. Use a clean and dry milk carton, juice carton, or cardboard box.
2. Cut out a rectangle on each side of the box, leaving about a 1″ border all the way around.  You are essentially creating a picture frame on each side of the box and your Halloween scene will go in the middle .
3. Paint the outside of the box black, or whatever dark color you’d like.  Black paint is ideal because it adds to the Halloween scene and gives it the evening silhouette you want.
4. Cut out a piece of wax paper, parchment, or transparent paper that will allow light to shine through it.
5. Stencil a design onto the paper, or you could also cut out a design and glue that to the paper.  This is where you can use your imagination to create a spooky or fun design.  Some ideas include making a jack-o-lantern face, or a witch riding a broom. Black construction paper is perfect for creating cut-out designs and a sharpie marker can be used to hand-draw a design too.
6. Tape or glue the paper with the design to the inside of the box.  You put the paper on the inside of the box so that the carton creates a frame around it.
7. Add an electric tea light, or LED light to the inside to light-up your decoration.

TIP:  Do you have solar powered garden lights along your front walkway?  Charge the lights during the day and then on Halloween night go out and add the milk carton decorations over the light for a glow-in-the-dark Halloween decoration that will look really cool!

Milk Carton Halloween Village

You can use the same technique outlined above to create your very own Halloween village.  This project is lots of fun to put on display on your front porch or entrance way.  It will be the first thing that visitors see when knocking on your door for trick or treating.

Image source: puuikibeach on Flickr CC 2.0

I hope you enjoy making your own Halloween lanterns and light-up decorations.  These are fun projects to do with the kids and you can make these crafts as easy, or complex, as you’d like.  Get creative and build your very own Halloween light-up display.