Handmade Halloween

Sick of Halloween decorations and costumes, fake cobwebs and plastic pumpkins festooning every shop you enter? For me, Halloween decorations and costumes should be based on stuff you have around the house, not on a load of mass-produced tat you buy and use/display for one day only. Waste of money, waste of the world's resources.

(The award for the most inappropriate Halloween display goes to my local B&Q, which had a 'trick or treat' bunting banner suspended over…the paint aisle. How about a beautiful display of your black grasses, nearly-black Cosmo atrosanguineus, dark purple-leaved heuchera and orange-flowered plants to salute the season instead?)

So here's a truly last-minute way to decorate your home or garden, made from stuff you're likely to have around the house: tiny dangling ghosts.

You will need
• Paper hankies
• Scrap paper
• Black felt tip
• Needle and black thread

Fold the hankies in four, corner to corner, to find the middle. Draw on two black circles for the eyes, slightly below that point. You can add a mouth if you want.

Crumple up the paper into a ball shape.

Thread the needle, keeping the thread doubled. Tie a knot in the end. Push the needle through the paper ball. Now position the hanky so that the needle comes out through the top of the ghost's head.
Squeeze the hanky around the paper ball to give a more drapy shape.

Tie your ghosts to a twig, window catch, mantelpiece… wherever you want.

More…
Last year I made a mini pumpkin lantern from a Cape gooseberry

Halloween on a smaller scale

I like to mark the seasons. Since I was a child I've celebrated Halloween by making a pumpkin lantern. But that's it, I don't festoon the house with cobwebs, and spend hours crafting hardboiled eggs into eyeballs.

This year, I've written features on easy ideas for Halloween decorations and how to carve a Halloween pumpkin lantern (with alternatives that don't require the use of a sharp knife). Among the alternatives to pumpkins are turnips (traditional but hard work to cut), and tangerines (not hollowed out, just decorated).

Because I can be trusted with a sharp knife, I have a large and small pumpkin, which I'll be carving with faces in the usual way.

But this year I've got a new idea: the tiniest-ever Halloween lantern.

It's made from a physalis, or Cape gooseberry (beloved of so many Come Dine with Me contestants as a dessert decoration), decorated with a black felt-tip face.

It would be great for places where you can't leave a candle burning, like the office. You could also decorate several physalis on a stem to put it in a vase.

Autumn leaves: what I rustled up

This week I've been writing about seasonal crafts, like how to carve a Halloween pumpkin lantern, and some other decorating options kids can do without using knives. I was also writing about craft ideas for autumn leaves for kids.

I love celebrating the changing of the seasons like this, being aware of and admiring what's around you (sycamore 'propellers', beech nuts, chestnuts – horse and human, leaves), and it makes great stuff to mess about with and make something from.

In the past I've made an autumn leaf wreath from the maple leaves from my own garden but this year they all got frazzled because I was away on holiday for the two hottest weeks of the year, so no autumn show!

This morning we went for a walk, and the leaves are just beginning to change colour. Having been looking at gorgeous images of leaves to go with my kids' activity ideas, I was inspired to make something with them myself. So I brought back sprigs of oak leaves, just turning golden with still-green veining, yellow beech leaves, and reddish-purple leaves from a tree I can't identify. (If anyone knows what they're from, please leave a comment!)

I made a very rough-and-ready leaf wreath, essentially just a couple of twined stems pulled from my neighbour's wall (thanks, Fergus) twisted into a circle, with leaves tucked in. It looks messy, but I like its naturalistic form. (And if I wanted, I could make something symmetrical and more polished.)

At the very least, it brightens up a bare patch of fence.

And brightening up a length of bare wall are these leaves-on-a-line. To make them, thread a needle with the desired length of thread, and tie the other end of the thread around a tiny twig, to weigh down your lines. Pass the needle through the leaf, near the top, alongside the spine, and back through the other side. This stops it sliding to the bottom. Stitch on more leaves until your thread is full.

How you hold them in place spends on their location. Mine are weighted down with a pebble from a high windowsill, but you could tie a hanging loop on the end of the tree to suspend from a nail, or tie the thread end around, for example, the bottom of a hanging basket. These lines of leaves twirl mesmerisingly in the breeze, and although they may only last a couple of days, they only take a couple of minutes to make.