Halloween Decorations- DIY Hanging Cage

We are continuing our Halloween decorations week with my version of a hanging cage, which I found here. The original version has a plastic skeleton inside, but my daughter has had a weird thing for spiders lately, mostly because she knows her grandma is scared of them and she thinks it's funny. So when I went supply hunting and I saw this giant spider I couldn't resist. Suddenly I thought, well one spider is good, a few more little ones in there too would be even better. Then I did the worst thing. I bought that fake spider web stuff. I seriously regret the spider web stuff.

Supply list:

-Two round plastic laundry baskets

-Spray paint (I used matte black and copper again)

-Prisoner for inside cage

-Spider web (optional)

-Zip ties

-Plastic chains

I probably should have used bigger scissors and I'm surprised these didn't break. You need to cut the top off of the laundry baskets to give them more of a cagey look when you tie them together. After the edges are removed, you get to spray paint (again!) I was able to use the same paint from the last project in a similar style. Unlike last time, however, the darker tones look better because it it supposed to be a mostly black cage. The little rusty bits do add a bit of character though. I was able to paint the copper more sparsely and use it only where I thought a rust spot would look good.

Assembly was where things began to get difficult. I had my spiders and my web, but how the hell am I supposed to get this web to stick to the top of the cage while still having it look like spider web. As I'm trying to figure this out, my daughter is happily trying to stick the plastic spiders into the piece of web I'm using. At the moment I have two kinds of tape in my house, electrical and duct. The electrical would have worked if it had been stickier. The duct looked horrible, and both kinds pulled paint off the basket. Well, I have my hot glue gun, that might work! Nope. It stuck to maybe three strands of that spider web and it fell off before I could even try to move it. My husband suggested a nail gun and I almost laughed at him. I went back to the duct tape and just decided to be done with it. I lost my temper with this one and I needed to take a step back. The duct tape fell off almost immediately after I took the picture.

Since the baskets are (obviously) the same size and wouldn't overlap for me to zip tie it shut, I cut through the top of one of the baskets so it could fit. I closed up the cage, and added the chain, which all went well except that the bottom basket warped a little bit. At this point I decided that I needed a little distance. After I cooled down and thought about it, I realized that my husband had actually had a good idea, and I went crawling to him for help. We got it fixed in about fifteen minutes, and I felt so much better about having the spider web secured with staples. It did require a thick piece to be able to hold, but it looks significantly better and more sturdy than what I had tried the first time. I was sad to see that some of the spray paint had chipped off from where I had tried to use the tape, but that's my fault for trying to use tape..

If I had gone with the skeleton or any of the other stuff on the Halloween aisle to put in this cage, it would have been a one afternoon project with no issues apart from a slight warp in the basket, which can easily be hidden in the back. I had never used the fake spider web before, and I didn't realistically think ahead about how I was actually going to use it. It almost got the better of me, but sometimes you do need to take a step back and think about the best way to approach the situation when you realize you don't know what you're doing. And my daughter still loved the cage even when it had the duct tape, so maybe I'm just being extra critical of myself.

So, the way this is gonna work is that I'm going to have a theme every week, and I will be covering a few different projects within each theme, which will be posting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Obviously, since it's October we're covering the holiday stuff now, but I have plans for a little bit of everything including woodworking, abstract painting, science experiments, and DIY gift ideas.