Spooky Halloween wreath

IKEA parts: Onskan red LED Christmas light string

There are a number of examples of skeleton Halloween wreaths on the net but mine has the added feature of a spooky red glowing skull, with burning red eyes!

ONSKAN christmas lights ONSKAN christmas lights

The skeleton itself is from a Spotlight craft store and is easily assembled into a wreath form using hot melt glue. I did a dry run to get the right shape and then a small spot of glue where the bones crossed each other to hold in place. Once I was happy with the basic shape I gave each joint a liberal application of the hot glue – this thing is not coming apart easily!

Glue the skeleton together to form a wreath

We had a set of IKEA Onskan red LED Christmas lights going spare and I thought it would be cool to have red eyes staring out at any visitors. First I took a drill and made holes in the eye sockets, there was already a hole in the back of the skull, and then using various bits of wire and string I managed to thread an LED light through each eye socket and hot glued into place, threading all the remaining lights into the skull.

Thread the lights through the eye socket

The battery compartment was hot glued onto the back of one of the long bones and the cables tidied up and tacked in place with more hot glue so none of the electrics could be seen from the front.

Spooky Halloween wreath

All that remained to do was string up the wreath using some fishing line onto the screen door and wait until twilight before flicking on the switch!

~ by Dominic Reynolds