Halloween Bats in Branches – Craft Lightning

I’ve teamed back up with Angie and Carolina to participate in a Halloween version of the craft lightning series.  Stick around until the end of this post to see all the other awesome bloggers who are participating this time around!  I knew that I wanted to incorporate some natural elements into my Halloween decorating so this project started off with sending my kids out into the yard to find some dead branches.  They are always so excited to help me with my craft projects and so I usually try to find ways to include them in the process when I can.  I also had this awesome red vase that my friend Kerry gave me when she was cleaning out her decor stash.

I started by taking all the branches my kids brought me and bundling them together so that there weren’t any giant gaps in branches and there weren’t any over crowded areas either.  I then used some washi tape (because it was what was closest to me and I had a handful of branches) to secure them all together. I suggest using a floral tape or a twist tie instead of the washi tape, because the tape kept ripping and kind of stands out like a sore thumb if you look into the vase. But I had already done it and it is a temporary seasonal decor so I wasn’t too worried.

Once you have your branches bundled and connected, go ahead and stick them in your vase. If you don’t have something lying around the house check out your local thrift shop, I ALWAYS see metal canisters and vases at my local Goodwill and you can pick something up for a couple of bucks easily. Then came the fun part.  I looked online for a bat template that I liked.  I wanted something that was fairly simple and totally classic.  I pasted it into a blank word document three times and then resized the image so that there was a small, a medium and a large bat shape.  I printed it, cut each bat shape out and then taped them onto a couple of pieces of black construction paper I had folded in half.

I then cut around the outline of each bat until I had 12 black paper bats in three different sizes.  Once they were ready to go I simply used a piece of tape to attach them to different branches until it looked just right.