I’ve been wanting more spooky Halloween decorations, but store-bought stuff is really overpriced. Plus, writers work for peanut shells nowadays, and I’m more into homemade stuff anyway. I also have a wood pile full of old wood from a privacy fence and storage box we had to finally let go and some old furniture, so…

I like pretending I can do things. And what’s even weirder, I can usually do the things I pretend I can when I really try.

I also like pretending to be Amish. I don’t like power cords or batteries made with materials mined by slaves, so I got out Ye Olde Handsaw and carved me up a couple of headstone shapes. It’s harder than it looks. Lots of triangles come into play when cutting a curve with a plain old saw.

But I got the pieces cut. And even made a couple of easy peasy crosses from some old fence boards we had lying around.

The painting is always the fun part. My older girls LOVE painting almost as much as I do, and they helped to get the first coating down.

Then I used my bubble letter “expertise” to put some funny names on these new decorations with a marker.

The girls filled them in with white paint and I edged the lettering before we sealed everything.

I hammered in some boards to the back of the rounded headstones to make them stand up, and now we have our creepy graveyard, ready for all the Halloween thrills!

You really don’t need a bunch of fancy tools to do what you want.

You can make anything with the basics. (It just takes a little extra work)