Halloween Decorative Ghost

When I was a young child my family had these clothe Ghosts that would be pulled out every year for Halloween.  I remember them so vividly especially since I loved Halloween!  I think one of the reasons was because Halloween is the starting point for all the fall holidays leading up to Christmas!

Now that I have my own family I wanted to make some ghost for us in hopes that as my daughters get older they will love them as much as I did. So I started my search on the internet to try and find a way to make them.  However, I was unsuccessful. I found tons and tons of different crafts on how to make ghosts for Halloween such as milk-jug ghosts or clay ghost but none of them were the ghosts from my childhood. Since I couldn't find what I was looking for my creative side had to come out! I headed down the craft store bought what I thought I would need and then sat down at my dining room table and figured out how on earth I was going to make these things!

Lucky for me I was successful and the ghost came out just how I remembered them and how I wanted them to look! I did change one thing from my memory and that was that I didn't use black felt to make the eyes I used fabric paints. So you can use felt if you would rather I just didn't want to mess around with cutting and gluing small pieces. I was going for easy!

These instructions are for making four ghost, if you want more you will need to adjust the materials.

Materials:

• 1 yard of white material (I used a material that was slightly shiny and was stringy when I cut it but you can pretty much use any white, off-white, ivory or whatever color and type you want)
• 1 yard of orange ribbon (whatever kind of ribbon you can find but i used the thinner width ribbon *see pic)
• 4 "golf ball" size foam balls (sorry I don't know the actual dimensions!)
• white thread
• needle
• fabric paint (or felt)
• pins
• tacky glue

Alright, first thing first do prep work! Thread that needle! You won't need a whole bunch but a good amount will be used so just give yourself enough. I would suggest threading the needle before making each ghost. It will save you time later and you won't be struggling to hold something and thread a needle at the same time. Make your life easier and prep your craft work just like you would cooking. :)

Now that your needle is threaded go ahead and do the next prep work which is to cut the material into 4 equal parts. You can measure it out if you like. I am never that concerned with exact precision so I just folded it in half cut it so I had two pieces and then folded the halves in half and cut again. You do what you feel comfortable doing.

Grab the orange yard ribbon and cut into four equal parts. You can make the neck tie as long or as short as you would like. I suggest getting a yard so you have extra to work with because I did not use the entire yard when I made the neck ties for the four ghost.

Now to actually begin:

Take one of the four pieces and place it in front of you and place the other three pieces aside. Take the first piece of material and drape it over one of the foam balls. I placed the balls in the middle of the material and aloud the material to drape diagonally over the ball. Now pinch the material directly underneath the foam ball. This will be the neck. Look at the head and body of your ghost and see if you like what you see. If you don't mess around with the draping until you get the look of a ghost. It took a couple times of me rearranging the material on the ball to get a good looking ghost. So be patient! You might get it right away or it might take a minute or two.

Once you have successfully draped the material grab that needle and thread that you prepared earlier. Do not let go of the neck! Now, run the needle through the middle back of your ghost's neck. Pull it through to the front. Never letting go of the neck just adjust your finger and thumb out of the way. Pull all the way through then loop the string from the front back to the back, either on the right side or the left side, and pull through to the front again. Do not put through same hole. Next repeat this doing it on the opposite side. There is a picture to help explain this process a little better.* Hint: You can string the needle and thread through the bottom of the foam ball for extra security! I did this!

Once you have the neck strung securely, meaning you aren't worried about the ball coming out of the material or the material separating when you let go of the pinched neck. Let go of the pinched neck. Set the ghost aside.

Grab the orange ribbon and place it around the neck of the ghost loosely. Not too loose just a small about to make the neck appear a little thicker than it is. Now criss-cross the orange ribbon. I put the right side ribbon on the bottom and the left side piece of ribbon on the top. Now pin this down at the point where they make an 'x'. Flip your ghost over and stick three small sticks in the back to secure the neck tie to the ghost. Note: Don't place the ghost on the table because you don't want the pin going all the way through to the back where you are trying to stick those three sticks. Flip your ghost back to the front and un-pin the tie. Next, take the tacky glue and place one dot of glue on the white material pushing the right bottom ribbon down onto it. Followed by a dot of glue on the orange bottom ribbon placing the top orange ribbon on top of that. This is important replace the pin! This will help hold the ribbon in place while it dries.

Let the glue dry and then remove the pin! Now is the fun part! Grab the fabric paint and simply paint on a face! I would suggest using a piece of cardboard or paper to test out how well you use the paint or how easy it is to use it and what kind of faces you want to make. Once the face is done let it dry before adding any more details. If you try to add too much detail, such as names or words on the bottom of the ghost (see pic) you may risk messing up the face. It is much better to just let the face dry move onto another ghost and after all the ghosts are done add the names or Halloween sayings on the bottom.

After repeating the process with each ghost and after adding on any last detail using the paint simply use some string and run it through the top of the head I would suggest stringing it through the foam ball, to create a loop to hang the ghost on the wall or from the ceiling!

Enjoy these family favorites of mine!! 

Note: I am not sure if this would be a good craft to do with any child under 8 or 9 because of the difficulty of making the actual ghost and dealing with the paint.  But you could always pre-make the ghosts and cut out different felt faces and let younger kids mix and match the faces to make their own ghosts!  And if you really had sometime time cut out bats, words like "BOO!" and other Halloween symbols for the younger kids to pick out to add to their ghosts!  Get creative!!

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