Googly Eyed Halloween Fun!

Are you looking for a fun craft to jumpstart your Halloween spirit?? Then check out this craft!!

In this post I will walk through from start to finish this craft in all its googly-eyed glory!!

To start out, here are the mandatory items you will need (I will link the items I used in the list) :

•  Printer
• Transfer Paper
• Scroll Saw
• Spare Blades
• Palm Sander
• Sanding Discs
• Eye Hooks
• Drill
• Drill Bits
• Paint Brushes
• Paint
• Super Glue
• GOOGLY EYES!!!
• Scrap wood- I used some 1/2 inch thick pine laying around the garage.

Here are the optional that help the craft go even better:

• Wicked Halloween Spirit
• Motivation
• Coffee
• A nice significant other that lets you work in your CRAFT CAVE!!!
• Multi Tool for sanding tight spots
• Twine- optional way of hanging

Now lets CRAFT these GOOGLY EYED BAD BOYS

STEP ONE

Search the Interwebs for any pictures of Ghosts, Goblins, Bats, Pumpkins etc.. and print them out. Again, I use this because I can print right off my phone over the wifi using this Printer sitting anywhere in my house and it will be sitting warm on my printer within seconds. Here is an example of the patterns we chose:

STEP TWO

Place the transfer paper, graphite side down on the wood. Then place your spooky template over the transfer paper and trace the outline of the image. This is what mine looked like after tracing:

STEP THREE

Pull up a chair in front of the Ol’ Scroll Saw and cut cut cut.

This process takes a little time depending on the number and intricacy of your shapes your cutting out. The bats we cut out were the most challenging to cut and take approximately 3-5 minutes to cut out taking it slow. The variable speed dial on my scroll saw is easy to adjust to whatever speed you want to cut. As you can see in the picture, I like to run a shop vac attached to my scroll saw when cutting. This keeps the dust down. My Mancave is basically my baby, and like any good father, you should keep that baby warm and clean.

STEP FOUR

After you have all your shapes cut out, its time to smooth out all the edges so nobody gets hurt. When kids are involved, its good to mitigate possible tears. And if someone flings a non-sanded-pokey-six-inch-bat at someone else, there is a high change of tears. I used 60 grit sand paper out of this Assortment. The more aggressive grit helps make it sand faster. But be careful to not chip off any pieces if you are going hard with the sander. Also I used the optional Dremel Multi Tool which helped reach the tight spots. You could achieve the same results with a folded 5” sanding disc and some elbow grease. Here is the final sanded result: 

STEP FIVE

Time to drill. Grab a 1/16″ inch drill bit and carefully drill a 1/2″ or so hole in the location of your wood piece that you want to attatch the eye hook into. Be careful when drilling and screwing to not crack the wood. I recommend going slow and center your drilling location in the middle of the wood. The pumpkins were tricky because I drilled into the stem. I went very slow and had good luck. Some scrap wood like pine may be more prone to cracking than a higher quality wood like oak or maple. If you have trouble screwing the eye hooks into the wood you can step up your drill bit size one size up. 

Here is the Drill I use, the Drill Bits I use, and the Eye Hooks I used in this project. 

STEP SIX

Screw in the eyehooks into the wood and admire your work!

STEP SEVEN

Lay out your craft and get everything ready to go. I set out all my paints and brushes and googly eyes for quick grabbing. For this particular craft I enlisted the help of some very excited kids and their parents for a fun Halloweeny paint session.

Depending on where and how your going to craft, add a little fun and spice up the atmosphere. We threw on spooky Halloween music on Spotify and got ready to go. 

STEP EIGHT

Paint Paint Paint! We used some scrap wire placed through the eye hook to hold it to reduce the amount of sticky paint fingers flailing around wildly. This allowed to paint all the sides and also worked great for hanging up the pieces to dry.

The kids and everybody seemed to have a great time. You can definitely do this project solo but is a great way to spice up any Halloween get together or even a busy rain day. The paint should dry in just a few hours depending on the temp and humidity where you are painting. Start to finish, our paint was dry within an hour or so with the help of a hair dryer. 

STEP NINE

Get your Googly-Eye on! The Googly Eyes that we bought on Amazon have a sticky adhesive on the back of them. We removed that and opted to put a dab of super glue on to hold them. The kids had a good time picking out eyes and we had the adults help use the glue because nobody wants to peel a layer of skin off trying to get super glue off.

FINAL STEP

Tie your twine through the eye hook and enjoy! I didn’t get a final picture of all of the crafts line up. They were headed out the door as fast as they were finished! 

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If you end up doing this craft send me pictures or post to Northern Man Craft page!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!