The second Hansel and Gretel prop I made for Halloween this year were giant cotton candy inspired by this pin. It doesn’t look like that blog is available anymore, but making these is actually pretty easy, as long as you don’t mind hot glue gun burns.

Materials:

Wood dowels (to stake the cotton candy in the ground)

Plastic Poster Board (plastic to be weather proof outside)

Chinese Paper Lanterns (not the wishing lanterns, the round decorative lanterns)

Poly-fil

Hot Glue

Spray Paint

Large Gift Basket Bag (Optional)

Bow (Optional)

To start, roll the poster board into a cotton candy cone shape. There are some You tune videos out there if you need help. I tried to make sure there was a large enough hole in the cone that my wood dowel would fit into. Tape the cone down and slide the wood dowel into the cone. Then I taped the cone onto the wood dowel.

Next put together the Chinese paper lantern. I slide the dowel and cone into the lantern from the top and then hooked the lantern onto the top of the cone.

Now you will take pieces of the Poly-fil and glue them onto the lantern using the hot glue gun. If you really want to make a nice cotton candy, I think some wool roving would really look like cotton candy, but since I was making several of these, that was a bit expensive to try. It will take a lot of gluing and a lot of hot glue to make each cotton candy, I even went and bought a larger gun that uses larger sticks to make it faster to make.

Once all the Poly-fil is on the lantern, just spray paint the color you want. I did pink and blue.

To finish it off, use a large gift basket bag and bow (optional). I have bags on all of them to protect them from the weather, but they don’t all have bows, only a few came with the gift bags.

This year’s Halloween theme is Hansel and Gretel. My first prop that I made were large cupcakes, inspired by this pin. To make my cupcakes I decided they needed to be topped with cherries.

So a few years ago my friend Trish and her friend’s dressed up as banana splits, they each had different costumes and Trish made them hats topped with these amazing cherries she made. Trish is an artist and a Multimedia Designer at my company (super talented), so I asked her how she made her cherries, see one of her amazing banana split hats, below.

To make the cherry start with a block of green flower arrangement foam (the soft foam) and carve it into the shape of a charry. I started with a pairing knife and then used some Styrofoam tools to smooth out. I have a set of plastic tools I picked up at a craft store years ago. Afterwards she said to coat the foam with a plaster and sand it smooth. I decided to use a joint compound, which probably wasn’t the best choice, but after several applications and sanding I finally got my cherries to look decent. The problem with the joint compound was that it kept coming off the foam leaving divots. I tried to paint over them, but it was still noticeable. Then I found some small joint compound patch, that I was able to use to fill the pocks in my cherries. I painted my cherries with red paint and finished them off with a glossy bright red spray paint. For the stems, Trish had taken a wire and wrapped with masking tape and painted it. I had found these green wrapped flower arrangement wire and decided to use that as my stem. I folded over the ends a little to make them look like the little nubbins on the ends of cherry stems.

For the cupcakes, I bought some dollar store plastic flower pots and covered them in corrugated cardboard sheets. I filled the pots with insulating foam, took about 1 1/2 to 2 cans per pot to fill it up with foam. For the sprinkles, Trish had mad her sprinkles using sculpty clay. I was trying to make my own sprinkles, when I came across these balloon sticks I had bought years ago, so I cut them into pieces, instant sprinkles!

After the foam hardened I used a glue gun to glue the cherry and sprinkles on the cupcakes. I made 6 total. I certainly made some mistakes, and they’re not all awesome. But I think they came out pretty good, overall.