A Wall Full of Bats

11:30 PM Unknown 0 Comments

I've been dreaming of how I was going to decorate for Halloween for a few weeks now. I had this picture in my head of tons of flying black bats covering a wall. It sounded pretty epic to me.

It probably all stemmed from me wanting to cover my wall in the first place. I love my apartment, but I just haven't figured out what to do with one of the walls yet. Seriously though, it's the most boring wall you've ever seen (that's the top of my dresser):

So that's where this weekend project all started.

Let's start with what I put on top of my dresser. I literally went through everything in my apartment to find anything and everything that was orange or Fall-ish. I was amazed at the things I came up with: A vase full of candy corns, an orange candle (never mind that it smells like mango - the opposite smell of Fall), a white pumpkin, a yellow aspen vase we got for our wedding, and of course the printable from last week. Oh, and an orange and black spider-webbed table runner I just happened to have lying around...

And now for the bats.

My husband and I spend the weekend cutting bats out of construction paper. He was such a champ to stick with it! It only took a couple hours to cut about 60 bats. I'll admit - halfway through cutting them out, I thought to myself, "Now why am I doing this??" You'll probably feel the same way when you cut yours out too, but my advice? Stick with it!! It's totally worth it once you start hanging them on the wall.

I was trying to make the bats look like they were coming out of the vase, and I'm really happy with the effect it created. The other trick when hanging them up is to keep the bats close together at the starting point, and then space them out more as they fly up the wall (it makes for a cool effect, and makes the bats look more realistic).

It took a little trial and error to find the "shape" the bats created on my wall, but I am VERY happy with it. You don't want it to look too geometrical. You can even see that I placed some bats on my ceiling!

And the finished product:

The hardest part of this whole thing was finding a stencil to cut out my bats from. Lucky for you, Robyn created this awesome family of different sized bats. Enjoy!

Click here to get the pattern.