Switched to LED? Upcycle Your Old Bulbs with DIY Halloween Crafts!

Congratulations! You’ve switched to LED lights in your home and saved money and energy. But what do you do with the old incandescent bulbs haunting your home? With Halloween right around the corner, upcycle the old bulbs and give trick-or-treaters pumpkin to talk about!

Make your bulbs into boo-tiful DIY Halloween decorations, such as ghosts, witches, or pumpkins. You just need a light bulb, paint, and a few other supplies.

• Lightbulbs
• Paint: orange
• Paintbrush
• Green Ribbon
• Scissors
• Black marker

You can make any design you’d like. This tutorial specifically covers how to do a pumpkin design. Let’s get this party startled:

Paint the bulb with orange paint. Then rinse your brush and paint the base green for the pumpkin stem. Cover the entire bulb so that you cannot see through it. Try to tie the bulb to a hook above your work area to avoid touching wet paint. To prevent the colors from blending, make sure the orange paint dries completely before painting the stem.

Note: After you paint the lightbulb, do not put it in a light socket. Paint poses a fire hazard, or it can melt and create a mess.

After the bulb dries, add the Jack-O-Lantern face. Turn the bulb so that the green stem faces up and draw the face on the round part of the bulb. Use the black marker to draw the eyes, nose, and mouth. Have skele-fun and draw whatever shapes you want!

Once you finish the face, move on to the final step: the stem. Take the green ribbon and tie it around the stem of the bulb. This gives it a more 3-D look like an actual pumpkin stem. After you complete this step, place your decoration anywhere you’d like!

The round shape of a light bulb offers many other eerie-sistable decoration ideas besides a pumpkin:

• Use white paint on both the bulb and stem and a white ribbon to create a ghost.
• Paint a vampire face and use felt as a cape
• Use green and black paint to make a Frankenstein face
• Paint a witch face and use a mini witch hat from the craft store or make you own with felt!
• Use black paint to make a bat and make wings out of felt or fabric

Wondering where to put your newly painted DIY light bulbs? Try these fang-tastic ideas:

• Glue your bulbs to a Halloween wreath to make a festive greeting for trick-or-treaters.
• Tie strings to your bulbs and use them as ornaments in a Halloween tree.
• Put the bulbs in a bowl with fall-colored confetti to make a centerpiece for your table.

Now you not only have gourd-geous decorations, but you helped keep trash out of landfills and learned the fun of upcycling! These decorations will make your home spook-tacular for Halloween year after year. Enjoy!

We’d add one more pun here, but it’s not very humerus.