The Easy Way To Decorate Your Lampshades For Halloween This Year

The shift from regular décor to fall and Halloween décor can often be a lot of work. Hauling out the pumpkins and the ghouls is one thing, but swapping and storing other decorative pieces until another season can be challenging. The best solution to all this work may be dialing up the spookiness of your regular decor and accent pieces, making them amenable to the season by adding fall foliage, pumpkins, bats, and ghosts to areas like gallery walls, floral arrangements, wreaths, and other more permanent pieces. Instagrammer @aurelie.erikson recently showed a quick and ready-made way to add a little horror to your lamps and light fixtures with very little expense and effort.

Black bats, storebought from craft retailers or cut out old-school style from construction paper, are a great Halloween accent that can be both simple and spooky. In employing those winged creatures on the inside of a regular lampshade, you instantly have a Halloween-ready lamp. Even better, after Halloween, they are very easy to remove and store completely flat.

Bat cutouts typically come in various sizes, and many are cut and folded to appear 3D. While they are great for use on windows, walls, and for paper crafting, they can also be stuck to almost anything in your home for an instant transformation. Using some double-sided tape, affix your bats inside the lampshade of your favorite ordinary lamp to instantly make it part of your Halloween decor. The bats will also cast shadows around the room and intensify the creepy atmosphere, particularly if you swap out your regular bulb for a colored one in orange, purple, red, or green. When the Halloween season is over, remove them for an easy transition to Thanksgiving and the other holidays. 

The hack is not limited to bats; it can also be used for cutouts in the shape of ghosts, jack-o-lanterns, or other Halloween creatures. For a fun activity, try creating a Halloween scene with paper cutouts on your lampshade with a haunted house, a rickety fence, and swirling bats. Not limited to traditional lamps, try this fun hack on hanging barrel-style lamp shades, lanterns, or sconces for a similar effect.