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I hinted at this on Instagram quite awhile ago, but this year’s Halloween theme is….Haunted Camping! You know, because of the new trailer and all. I was actually planning to use a vintage toy camping set I found at the thrift store, but it turned out the tent from that was sort of huge and garish….and also a little broken. So I made a tent out of a piece of black card stock instead:

Here’s the tutorial for that:

1. Take a piece of black card stock
2. Fold in half

Then I stuck a skeleton from Michaels in there. It’s actually only the skull and rib cage, because, for some reason, Michaels (or at least my Michaels) doesn’t sell just miniature skeletons–they sell a bag of assorted skeleton parts, which are not all to the same scale.

And what happened to this poor camper? Well, I don’t really know, but I hear there are BEARS in the haunted woods. Probably like extra scary haunted-type bears. They look pretty menacing:

My original idea was to cut out bear silhouettes out of card stock, but I couldn’t find any sufficiently terrifying bear outlines online. So I ordered these guys from Amazon: hind legs scary bear and four legs on the ground scary bear.

Also, I mean, the camping guy must have passed RIGHT BY this ominous little graveyard on his way to his doom:

I tried to think of more scary camping/bear puns for here, but I couldn’t. The chalkboard mini-tombstones are also from Michaels.

What else? The tree with the lights on it I found at the thrift store a few years ago (the lights are purple string lights from Target). The other taller trees are from the dollar section at Target (but the $3 part of the dollar section, sadly) and then I strung Halloween colored beads on them (also from Target).

And then the smaller trees in front I made from paper lunch bags! Super simple. I used this tutorial from Pikadilly Charm, but then instead of leaving them brown and putting and colorful paper leaves on them, I spray painted them black so they’d be more HAUNTED.

Here is the unlit up version:

So this year’s Halloween is less literary (and less elaborate) than last year’s, but the kids got their theme, and I got to incorporate bears, the scariest thing in the whole world.

We’ve still done nothing outside, but that’s largely because it’s been raining here since the beginning of time.

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