How to transform your home with easy, budget-friendly Halloween tricks

Whether you're having a Halloween party or just decorating for the season, here are a few of The Party Fairy's favorite "tricks" to add a little dramatic flair to your front porch or the inside of your home.

Pre-schoolers can be terrified of candy bowls with hands that move, skeletons that rattle their cages and other decorative Halloween items stocked in stores at this time of year. These simple and inexpensive decorating tricks are designed to add seasonal ambiance appropriate for young children -- without the hallmark gore and style of a teenage horror flick.

School-age children really enjoy helping with these simple projects, and delight in seeing their handiwork admired by guests.

And these easy activities are budget-friendly, so you'll have a little money left over to buy candy this season!

Create Glowing Torches

To adorn your walls with glowing "torches," you'll need a couple of 2-liter plastic soda bottles, black and silver craft paint, wooden dowels, orange tissue paper and small, round battery-operated "push on" lights. These lights are sold at most large discount chains, some drug stores, hardware stores and many dollar stores.

Turn the soda bottles upside down, so that the cap area is on the bottom. Cut away the top two-thirds of the bottle. Insert a plastic dowel into the bottle opening to create the torch handle. Paint the "torch" black and silver.

When the paint is dry, place the push light inside the round opening. Turn it on and cover it with orange tissue paper. For best effect, make sure to wrap the push light so that pointed edges of orange tissue paper are sticking out above it like flames.

In a dark room, the push light will glow through the tissue paper, creating the effect of fire.

Create Cauldrons of Glowing Embers

Another fun special effect is to fill black plastic cauldrons with "glowing embers."

Simply fill the bottom of the cauldron with crumpled newspapers, cover with a layer of black plastic sheeting (a trash bag works fine!) and create a top layer of "embers" by wrapping a strand of Christmas lights in crumpled orange tissue paper.

Plug in the Christmas lights, turn off the lights in the room you're using and viola! It's "magic."

Create Bars for Doorways

It's also simple to create prison bars-or a cage-in your home's doorways. This trick is particularly effective in a hallway, where a series of doors with bars creates a dungeon-like effect.

To make bars, use wooden dowels sold at craft stores, inexpensive plastic pipes sold at home improvement centers-even cardboard tubes collected from rolls of wrapping paper and inserted one into another.

Spray paint the bars black or silver and create "rust" with a second application of metal-colored paint. Allow to dry and wedge the fake bars vertically into your door opening.

This trick has a practical use as well; it can create fun "do-not-enter" barricades for certain rooms in your home during Halloween parties.

This hub was contributed by The Party Fairy, a special events and party service in Richmond, VA.