DIY Thursday: Trick or Treat Seasonal Blocks

Every time I walk into Quilted Bear I see so many cute decorations.  If I had free rein in that store, I could get into some major trouble.  I especially love the holiday stuff.  I have been wanting to make some holiday blocks for awhile, so I figured, Halloween is coming next month, I might as well get going now.  I was happy with how cute they turned out.

First, go to your local Home Depot or Lowe's.  Grab a 2x4 (preferably one without a lot of knots).  Have the nice person in the lumber department cut your blocks for you.  I had them cut 3 inch, 5 inch and 7 inch, but you can do as big as you want.  You will be left with the rest of the 2x4, but stay tuned and I'm sure we'll be coming up with some more uses for the wood.

Get out your sandpaper and smooth the corners and edges and surface, if needed.  Then grab your paint brushes and paint and paint each block whatever color you want.  Since this was for Halloween, I did purple, green, and orange.  I had to do 2 coats of paint.  I also painted some glitter paint to give it a little sparkle =)

Next, gather some ribbons, papers, stickers, buttons, whatever you want.  I found a pack of cute Halloween paper at Michael's and there was some ribbon that matched.  Then I figured, it needs some candy stickers since it's about trick-or-treat =)  Now this is where you get to be creative.  Decided where you want the papers, and what size.  Once you got that, get out the modge podge, paint the block where you are placing the paper.  then place the paper.  Let it dry completely before moving on.

Next, you can either use your handy dandy cricut and cut out vinyl letters, use some colored paper, or use the sticker packs of already cut out letters.  I love my cricut so I did some vinyl lettering.  Make sure to measure that each word will fit your blocks, measure each block and word (mine almost didn't fit because I measured wrong and didn't measure each block).  Place the lettering on your blocks.  Once you have it positioned, go over the whole thing with some more modge podge.  Let it dry completely again.  Place your stickers, ribbons, or buttons or whatever you chose wherever you want.  Easy, huh?  And lots cheaper than the ones I see at Quilted Bear.  The only thing I bought special for this was the blocks, which a 2x4 is $2-$3 and the stickers which were $1.50.  I already had the vinyl, I was using the scrapbook paper to do my Halloween scrapbook pages (which turned out super cute too!) and I already had the paints, but they are only $1.40 each.  So not too bad =)  It's all about using what you got =)

http://whilehewasnapping.blogspot.com/2011/09/halloween-link-party.html