You guys know I love all things Halloween! I have a serious proud parent moment every time one of my kids mentions how it’s their favorite holiday only second to Christmas! Every year I turn to Pinterest to get all kinds of Halloween inspiration and this year I get to share 5 of my favorite Pinterest inspired Halloween Decorating Ideas on The Today Show Tuesday!

I thought since 5 projects is my specialty (hellooo Weekender) I’d pick 5 of my favorites to try out during the segment.  Halloween is actually the biggest holiday on Pinterest, so it was hard to choose, and I pinned a ton of additional ideas I loved on this board so you can check ’em out.  But, here’s what we came up with as our top 5!

# 1 – Skull Succulent Planters

I loved this idea and decided to try it with faux succulents since live ones aren’t super easy to come by in October here on the East Coast… also, it means we can use them year after year! Creating these creepy fellas was super simple- here’s how we did it.

First, perform a lil’ lobotomy on your plastic skull (make sure the ones you’ve bought are hollow- we got ours at JoAnn Fabrics) you can use a hand saw or a chop saw to cut off the top front section of the head.

Add some floral foam into the skull, so that your succulents have some thing to grip onto. Layer in your succulents- there’s no exact science to this, just have some fun with it.  We bought a variety of colors and varieties of faux succulents and mixed and matched them.

#2 Pumpkin Planters + Washi Tape Pumpkins

A trend I’m seeing on Pinterest this fall is to swap your plants out for pumpkins! I LOVE this idea! A plant stand or macrame plant hanger is the perfect place for some pumpkins! We used the classic tiered IKEA planter and a cute mini stand from Target.

One little mom issue we had this year… my kids wanted to carve their pumpkins on October 1st, but that 100% means moldy pumpkins way before Halloween. Enter Scotch Expressions Washi Tape to save the day! We used this washi tape on some of our pumpkins to decorate them and then we’ll carve them the week of Halloween! Kids were happy, mom was happy, and blogger Monica was super happy because I think these X and chevron designs look freakin’ chic! You can get the Halloween washi tapes we used here – but they’re also sold in a ton of stores – my local Target had them too!

#3 Taxidermy Art

This is a fun project to get the kiddos involved in, and it still looks fabulous when it’s done. We bought some wood plaques at Michael’s (for like $1.00 each) and spray painted them black. While those were drying, we hand painted our plastic bugs, bats, and spiders gold. You can totally spray paint these if you’d like ( I love Valspar’s gold spray paint), but hand painting keeps the project more kid-friendly if that’s what you’re looking for.

Once everything is dry, use Scotch All-Purpose glue   to attach your taxidermy to the plaques – I like this glue because it holds almost instantly and is super strong.  We grouped a bunch of our specimens above the mantle and it looked pretty awesome!

#4 Monster Table Legs

This idea made my top 5 because most people have leftover costumes and this is a fun way to upcycle them!  Your exact process will vary based on what costumes you have, but we were able to make these awesome monster legs by cutting our costume legs to the size of our table (we just used a basic card table, but you could use your kitchen, dining table etc..) and then adding some felt toes.  Most costumes these days don’t have full feet so we just cut some “claw” toes and hot glued them on.  For the other side of the table on The Today show we made witch legs!  We used striped witch tights and wrapping paper tubes – our table legs were a bit too skinny for our liking.  Just slip the tights on the tube and then slide that onto your table leg. You can add some real shoes if you’ve got em (and don’t need to wear em!) or we used some fake little decorative shoes that we had leftover from decorations a few years back.  My kids love this idea and are expecting our kitchen table to be a monster for Halloween for sure!

#5 “Lit” Furry Monster Front Door

Our monster front door was wondering “Why Christmas gets to have all the light-up fun?!?”  We love the idea of incorporating lights into a Halloween door and doing so was easier than you might think!  I had two strands of oversized Christmas lights and I swapped out all the red bulbs on one with the orange from the other. The red made it feel a bit too xmas to me. Once they were “halloweened” (is that even allowed as a verb?) I ran them back and forth across the door, added some foam core hands, making it look like our monster had confiscated the Christmas lights.  One important tip here so you don’t destroy your front door and then blame me for having to repaint it… use Command light clips to hold your lights.  They’ll hold your lights right where you want them and remove cleanly. Painting front doors is a pain in the butt, so trust me on this one – use the clips.

Around the door, we added monster fir that we picked up at JoAnn Fabrics – we hot glued it onto foam core and then used double sided exterior tape to attach it to the door frame. Our eyes are just paper plates (we have a covered porch) and our teeth are poster board.  I have so much fun coming up with a new Halloween door each year, and this year my kids said our monster is “lit” (which I’m told means it’s super cool! Major mom points)

So there you have it – my Top 5 Pinterest Inspired Halloween Decorating Ideas! If you missed the live Today Show segment, you can check it out below (I’ll add the video as soon as it’s live!) Make sure you check out our Halloween Pinterest Board for tons more ideas, and check out the EC2 Halloween Archives to see all the other fun ideas and TV segments we’ve done the past few years!

Thanks Guys!

-Mon