Halloween shadow box

I found these little Zen Garden thingies at the Dollar Tree. I’m a sucker for a wooden shadow box, so for a buck, I got a perfect, already black, wooden shadow box to make something for Halloween.

I must say it wasn’t all that hard to toss out everything that came with the box. The little bag of sand and rocks went into my garden, (HA! – I say “garden” like I have one of those. Let’s be honest and call it the "back yard") the tiny rake was worthless and went into the recycle bin and I was left with a nice black box.

I have the mother load of Halloween stickers in my stash and ribbon too, so this was truly a $1 project. OK, $1.06 with tax. Uncle Sam needs his share. If you had to buy all of it, it would still be under $8.

First, I measured around the perimeter of the box and applied some red-double-sided sticky tape to secure my ribbon. You could just use glue if you don’t have that tape. But you should have that tape, it’s that awesome with ribbon.

I found the music page on-line for the background , printed it out, and applied it with ModPodge. I have a bat punch and used some black cardstock scrap to punch them out. I creased their wings to give some dimension. I cut a piece of spooky cloth from my stash (also from the Dollar Tree) and place it at the bottom to anchor the collage. It looks like a spider web - bonus!

A few minutes later, after playing around with placement and gluing everything down… project done and cute as a button. I have it propped in my kitchen window in front of one of my K's I collect.

Cackle, cackle, screamy screamy! Happy, happy Halloweenie!