Halloween Decorations

Gentle ideas for Halloween and Thanksgiving

Halloween decorations are often about bats, witches, ghosts and more scary things. Personally, I am not a fan. My decorating usually involves more gentle and kind elements. All year round nature offers beautiful seasonal elements which can be used for different occassions. Flowers and branches, stones and pine cones combined with simple DIY projects. Today we’ll be making an easy wire basket complimented with easy Halloween pumpkins!

Dried fruits for the fall season

One of the beautiful things about autumn are the seasonal fruits and vegetables. I pick them for cooking as well as decorations. Apples and rose hips are great for cooking, pumpkins and oranges for creative DIY projects. I especially love dried oranges because the slices make beautiful table setting, hanging ornaments or a garland. Whole dried oranges, on the other hand look like precious little pumpkins. Even more so when you place them into a gorgeous DIY wire basket! Let me show you how to do that.

Halloween Decorations - Wire Basket DIY

You’ll need:

• 5 whole oranges
• thin silver wire from a hobby store
• medium kitchen bowl as a mould
• scissors (clippers)

Instructions

Drying whole oranges to make little autumn pumpkins

Drying oranges is mostly about the low heat and time. Sliced fruit of course takes much less time to dry than whole oranges. Different tutorials say different things about how long the fruit should be inside the oven and at what temperature. However, my conclusion is that each of us has a different oven so just try what works best for you.

The best way is to slice the orange peel vertically about 1/2 - 1 inch apart and placing them onto a baking tray (even a metal grilling rag for better air circulation). Then dry the fruit inside the oven on aprox. 75 degrees for several days. Also, I turned on the oven fan to help the air rotate around the tray. You don’t want to bake or burn the fruit but rather slowly dry up the moisture from the peel and flesh. Turn the fruit or the tray regularly if you need to.

Making the DIY wire basket

Making the minimalist wire basket took much less time than the oranges! All you need is a thin wire, some clippers and a bowl as a mould to work over. The bowl will help you guide the individual wire pieces into a basket shape. I cut 8 pieces of a wire long enough to place them over the bottom of the bowl and folding them inwards over the edge. They stayed nicely in place this way.

Then I measured pieces according to the width of the basket bottom. The initial piece was the smallest. If your wire is thin enough, you can use embroidery needle for better manipulation. Take the first horizontal piece and start turning it around each of the crossing vertical pieces. Once you’ve gone all around in a circle, turn both ends together. Cut the next piece which will be a bit bigger and repeat the process as shown on the image.

Eventually you’ll be able to turn the basket the right side up as you reach the top edge of the bowl. When you do, you’ll be making the last horizontal line of the basket, the top edge. Make sure that as you go around you take each end of the vertical wire pieces and turn them around the horizontal edge for neat finish.