DIY Life

Haunted houses hold fascination for nearly everyone, especially around Halloween. Real or claimed to be real haunted houses can provide significant food for thought although they are seldom any scarier than a trip to the grocery store. If you want a haunted house experience for Halloween this year the first thing you might consider is trying to find a house that's haunted in your local area, but if you want a haunted house of your very own, you can try using some spooky music, lighting and props to send a chill up your neighbor's spine.

Start by considering your lighting, replacing outdoor lights with colored bulbs or even black lights can cast an eerie glow around your home. Try green bulbs for out in the yard, red bulbs for closer to the house and black lights inside. If you add in those black lights, you'll get the full affect from your guest's costumes which often feature colors that glow under black light. Consider stringing some of that fake spider webbing around the area of the light bulbs to help cast spooky shadows and add to the ambiance. Strobe lights in the bushes and in upstairs rooms can look very freaky and you will also find that yard torches can give a very "realistic" haunted feel to the area surrounding your haunted house. Just please be careful not to burn up any of the kiddies.

If a designer calls her site "Monster Crochet," she's practically required to have some horror-themed patterns on it. And so it is with Regina Rioux Gonzalez, whose awesome designs you might have seen in magazines like KnitScene and Crochet Today.

Regina's latest pattern is this Bloody Saw Scarf, which I first saw over on Craftster. It's made in a basic, worsted-weight wool yarn: the entire saw portion of the scarf is crocheted in gray, then the "blood" is crochet-embellished on top of it, on the "toothed" edge. Look closely, and you'll see that there are even handles at the ends of the saw!

Some of you will dig it because you're into the Saw horror franchise, others will make it for a horror fan friend, still others will just think this is attractively witty, silly, and/or gross. Whatever your interest in it, you can get the pattern from Regina's site for $5. While you're there, check the sidebar: you might be interested in patterns for her Wearable Web spider-web shawl ($5), her Dem Bones Scarf that looks like connected bones ($5), and her "monster fingers" pattern (free).