Use This Genius Soda Bottle Hack To Light Up Your Halloween Graveyard

Buying Halloween decorations and putting them up around the house is a lot of fun, but seasonal décor can be expensive. Instead of spending money on spooky embellishments or sticking to what you used last year, why not try a few DIY Halloween décor crafts? You can even turn it into a family activity, and spend the weekend making decorations while you watch your favorite scary movies. These DIY soda bottle lanterns are an excellent Halloween project to add to your list — they're perfect for creating a graveyard theme in your yard, along with rows of tombstones and skeleton arms poking through the dirt.

The Halloween lanterns are simple to make — you only need a few items, and you may even have most of the materials already, like a hole puncher, plastic soda bottles, a hot glue gun, and scissors. You'll also need to buy some black mesh fabric, twine, and small lights with a switch to turn them on and off. Dollar Tree has plastic flameless candles for $1.25 that you can use as an alternative to small lights. Walmart sells mesh fabric for $3.67 and twine for $1.

Set up your materials on a clean table. Start by cutting the top half of one soda bottle, then lay a piece of black mesh over the bottom half and place the bottle's neck upside down on top of the mesh. You should leave some black mesh spilling over the sides. Next, hole punch one side of the bottle, tie it with twine and then repeat on the opposite side of the soda bottle. Using the hot glue, stick a few pieces of twine around the bottle below the holes, wrapping the twine three or four times around the bottle. Finally, add your lights to the inside and you're done! You can repeat the steps to make as many lanterns as you need, then hang them around your front yard. Or, if you have a Halloween skeleton, you can hang a lantern from its arm.

The best part about this DIY is you can customize it to fit your Halloween theme. Try using different colored soda bottles, or add spider webs to the mesh fabric for an extra eerie effect – Michaels sells glow-in-the-dark spider webs for $1.79. Another option to make the lanterns scarier is to include fake blood from red candle wax or add spooky characters — like this pack of three skeletons for $1.79, also from Michaels.