Going Batty!

Presenting...

Bernard!

Barbara!

Betty!

and Bam Bam!

I love decorating for Halloween. If you're looking for a fun family project, here's one we did.

Check it out. This project took us 2 days because of glue drying time. If you use a glue gun I bet you could do it all in one day.

What you'll need:

• One black sock/bat
• Googly Eyes
• Small bit of white fabric (fangs)
  
• Small piece of string (smile)
  
• Black construction paper (wings)
  
• Embroidery floss (in Halloween colors) or yarn (decoration/hold the sock closed)
  
• Newspaper or paper towel (stuffing)
  
• Elmer's glue
• A big stick
• Some twine
  

Here's how to do it:

1. Get some old black socks. Stuff them with newspaper, paper towels, or other old socks. Stuff them to the desired size of your batty.
   
2. Tie off the sock with embroidery floss or yard then cut off the excess sock off with scissors.
3. Decorate your sock with googly eyes, string for smile, flannel for fangs, embroidery floss eyelashes, embroidery floss hair bows, an old bracelet your child doesn't wear for a necklace, small triangles for ears, etc. We just used normal good ole Elmer's white glue.
4. Get 2 pieces of black construction paper or card stock for each pair of wings (depending on how big you want your wings to be). Each wing needs a front and back. Draw the wing design with a white crayon on a doubled (folded) paper. Then cut out. We taped bits of pipe cleaners onto one side of the paper to look sorta like the wing bones and also to give it some strength. Then we glue sticked around the edges and stuck together.
5. Before finishing up the very ends of the wings, we inserted a popsicle stick into each side of the wing so if you held a popsicle stick in the middle, you'd have wing on either side.
6. Fastening the wings was the hardest part. We finally used velcro. One piece of velcro on the popsicle stick (in between the wings) and one piece on the bat body. With velcro you can make them more packable for the following year too.
7. Finally you just hang them on the stick. Put the string on the stick first and hang it on the wall to figure out how long you want each bat to hang. Hang them at different levels and different distances. I tried to hang each bat right next to a knot in the wood to give them support and also so they wouldn't move.

If you make some, send me a pic and make sure to tell me their names.