Halloween Crafting (Rewind) Week: Ghostly Sponge Prints

Hi friends! I have another one of last years Halloween projects to share with you today and since it seems I have run out of photos from 2011's crafting, this printing craft will finish up the week of "Halloween Rewind."

Like the potato printing craft I shared a earlier, this activity is so super easy, lemon squeezey!

All you need is black construction paper, white paint, sponges and scissors (black marker is optional). You will start by cutting out a few various ghostly shapes from a sponge. My 5 year old drew a few ghost shapes directly onto the sponge with a marker and I cut them out for him. 

Next you can get on with the sponge painting (remember when sponge printing to t-shirts was popular in the early 90's...or maybe that's just what my siblings and I liked to believe as we snatched ever blank top from of dresser drawers just so we could stick a paint-dipped sponge to it). Anyway, dip the sponge in a plate of white paint and then transfer to your construction paper (you may have to dampen the sponge slightly before adding paint if it is too hard or not pliable). If you want to add faces to the ghosts when they dry you can do that too.

I realize these last few projects aren't blow-your-mind creative or original but I think simple crafts are great time fillers for kids before running errands, after a nap, or whatever. Your kids might even be old enough to mostly guide themselves with crafts like these while you catch up on emails nearby. Hopefully you will be inspired to fit a quick project into your child's schedule this week.

Check out some of our other Halloween crafts HERE.

Halloween Crafting (Rewind) Week: Startling Spiders

It's October 3rd! That means project #3 from last year's Halloween projects collection. If I remember correctly I think we actually pulled this project from an old Halloween crating book we had checked out from the library.

To create these startling spiders YOU WILL NEED:

Paper egg cartons

Paint brushes and black paint (like a liquid tempera)

Black pipe cleaners

Scissors to cut pipe cleaners

Googly eyes

Glue for eyes

Yarn for hanging

After cutting apart our egg cartons into individual pieces, we painted them using black paint which you don't have to do if you prefer grey spiders. The paint we used was not a very good quality so when it dried it came out looking grey anyway. 

After the paint dried we poked four holes on two parallel sides of the carton piece using a thick needle--you could also use the end of a thin paintbrush (adults should preform this step however). If you want to hang your spiders you will also want to poke a hole in the top of the carton at this point and sting a long piece of yarn through the hole, knotting the yarn on the underside end of the carton. When that's done you can cut regular sized pipe cleaners in half and have the kids insert them into the holes diagonally (pipe cleaner inserted in top left hole should come out bottom right hole, pipe cleaner inserted in middle left hole should come out middle right hole, etc. See picture above for sample). Bend the wire slightly to form spider-like legs.

The last step is to glue on the googly eyes and hang them from the doorways of your home to startle your family members and guests.

Check out some of our other Halloween crafts HERE.

Halloween Crafting (Rewind) Week: Pumpkin Potato-Prints

If you like simple crafting projects with very little set-up and clean-up then this project is for you.

With 4 simple ingredients your kids can create their own jack-o-lantern characters to adorn your walls for a little Halloween spirit. 

You will need:

Potato halves

Orange Paint (we use a liquid tempera paint because it's washable)

Paper to print on

Paint pens or sharpies to give your pumpkins stems and character

I think you can figure out the step-by-step from the pictures alone (in spite of really bad lighting) but I will explain my process because I do have a couple tips.

I started by cutting 3 washed potatoes in half, drying off the exposed potato with a paper towel so the paint could stick and then I set them on a plate filled with orange paint. I also cut a bunch of strips of paper from a large pad of newsprint I had lying around. Next, each child grabbed a potato and began stamping their paper, it takes a few tries to figure out the right about of paint needed for each print.  

Since this project is so easy, my kids jammed through about 6 sheets each, printing about 6 pumpkins on one sheet in a very short amount of time (my kids were 3 and 5 at the time). The paint we used dried pretty quickly at which point the kids began coloring faces on their pumpkins using paint pens (you could use markers, they just have to be dark enough to color over the orange paint). Hang up your prints and throw out the potatoes, that's all there is to it!

Oh yeah, make sure you write the child's name on the paper before printing. All the artwork comes out looking very much the same and it will be hard to remember what paper belongs to what artist (obviously this won't matter to you if you're not working with more than one crafter). Also,  if you think you might want to keep any of the artwork on a long term basis, you should use a nice study paper that can handle thick paint. I used newsprint because I expected I would throw these out shortly after my kids completed the project but some of them turned out so cute I would have framed them to add to our collection of Halloween decor. As you can see above, the newsprint paper wrinkled quite a bit. Other than that, there's not much else to say. Happy Crafting.

Check out some of our other Halloween crafts HERE.

Halloween Crafting (Rewind) Week: Spooky Sensory Table

Hi friends! Wow, it's been a while since I have posted any of the projects my kids and I have been working on. We are still here...making...as usual, I just haven't made the time for sharing. Maybe that needs to change...maybe not, I'll have to mull over that for a bit. Either way I have designated this week as a posting week because it's the month of OCTOBER, our most favorite crafting month of the year! All of the projects I will be posting this week are activities that we actually did LAST year but I happened to have pictures and I didn't want the images to go to waste. Maybe next year I will post this years Halloween crafts, only time will tell.

This first project is not so much a craft but it's a nice activity for toddlers/preschoolers that should last through the whole month. Using uncooked black beans as the main ingredient you can make your very own Halloween themed sensory table (and if you've never stuck your hand in a pit of dry beans, I feel sorry for you)!

To our beans I added some tiny black cat and ghost erasers that the kids could dig out using sorting tweezers  then using an egg carton they sorted the erasers by quantity and/or type. This time a year is a great for finding Halloween trinkets that are perfectly sized to throw in a sensory table. Check out the dollar spot at your local Target and see what you can find.

If you can't find anything to your liking you can buy some white beans and use a black marker to draw a face for an instant ghost. I made a small handful of bean-ghosts and buried them at the bottom of the bin so the kids had to hunt for them. 

This activity is extremely simple and yet entertaining for young growing brains. It's pretty easy to come up with sorting or counting games and as a bonus it is themed after the best holiday of the year (in our opinion).

P.S. You can find sorting tweezers at many boutique style toy stores, learning supply store or even online. They are great for fine motor and fun for kids to use. Also, if your curious, our sensory tables were homemade using a bin and turned-upside-down-nightstand we got at Ikea (we got the idea from THIS Ikea hack. They were so affordable we made three!).

Check out some of our other Halloween crafts HERE.

X is for X-Shaped X-Ray

We made this X-y X using:

Chipboard cut from a cereal box for letter base

Black construction paper

White construction paper for bones
White vellum paper to mute the black background

Glue: stick

A bone-y book we like:

Bone Soup by Cambria Evans is a Halloweenish take on the classic Stone Soup tale. If your kids are not yet familiar with the original version of the story, this book still makes for a fun and slightly gruesome read as the villagers cast into the pot (or cauldron) spider eggs and toenail clippings (in place of carrots and onions). If your kids have experienced the classic tale however, they will probably enjoy this book even more because they will feel like they are in on the joke. We liked the illustrations in this one as well.

By the way, speaking of ghoulish re-dos, have you read Goodnight Goon; a Petrifying Parody? Obviously it's a take on the much-loved Goodnight Moon. My kids found this spookier version to be quite the hoot and begged for it again and again.

(More about Project ABC)

M is for Mangy Monster

We made this Mangy Monster using:

Chipboard from a cereal box for letter base

Orange construction paper

Wool Yarn for "fur"

Craft pom poms

Googely eyes

Glue: white Elmer’s for “fur” and hot glue for pom poms and googly eyes

A Monster book we like:

For some reason my kids are obsessed with Halloween—year round, consequently, we end up checking out at least one Halloween book per library visit which also means we read a lot of monster books.

On a recent library trip we came across an adorable non-Halloween Monster book called, Jeremy Draws a Monster by Peter McCarty. In this story little Jeremy prefers drawing alone in his room rather than playing outside with the neighborhood children. One day Jeremy draws a monster but the monster ends up being extremely demanding and quite rude. Eventually Jeremy decides the monster has worn out his welcome and so he takes him to the public transportation and sends him off for good. While Jeremy is seeing off the monster, the neighborhood children gather around him and asked if he’d like to play, he decides he does. A little reminiscent of Harold and the Purple Crayon and the main character draws his old world. A great, simple and cute read in both the story and illustrations. I highly recommend this one.

(more on Project A-B-C)

Pretty Pumpkin Recap

If you weren't busy eating glue then you were using it to decoupage tissue paper onto little pumpkins!

To make these at home for your autumn decor, here is Charissa's 'pretty pumpkin' recipe:

• we-be-little pumpkins which you will cover with squares of torn...
• tissue paper using...
• white glue (thinned with water) and fingers or craft sponge. Top it off with some...
• glitter (optional)

Thank you Charissa for putting on such a great autumn time make!

Paper Crafting; Spooky Style

We have been doing some Halloween paper crafts recently and below is a sampling of our efforts.

Skull and Crossbones Vertical Garlands:

These were made using 3 craft punches; a large circle, small circle and skull with crossbones. We assembled with a glue stick and craft thread. (Thread was glued between two circles, making it double sided).

This would be a great thing to hang in a doorway or better yet, use it as the backdrop for a Halloween photo booth.

Candy Corn Bunting:

No worries if you don't like candy corn—these ones are non-edible. We glued orange and yellow strips of paper on a sheet of white paper then I cut out triangle shapes. After that I smoothed the corners with a round corner punch. Before stringing all of them up on some craft thread, I went over the sides and corners of the candy shape with a brown pastel and cotton ball. Dulling down the bright card stock helped to sophisticate this embellishment just a bit—it candy corn can be sophisticated! I intentionally made this bunting from paper rather than fabric to save time but I think (even I) could have moved faster whipping it through the sewing machine had I used fabric. Oh well, fabric I didn't have and paper I did.

Halloween Badges:

The same skull and crossbones punch was used here. The rest was freehand. I basically followed a tutorial I got from HERE. It's SOOO easy and customizable by size. Wouldn't this be a cute prize to give out at a children's Halloween party? Otherwise you could use it as a little emblem to accompany your little one's costume on Halloween night. If your kids are anything like mine, they will just want to wear them around the house for fun, which is actually what we made these for very early in the month (that explains the tattered look of the ones pictured here). To make these badges wearable I hot glued a safety pin on the back. Fabric ones might be even cuter and you could use them year after year!

Projects like these are nice because I feel like they are a usable crafts, meaning they won't just go in the trash the next day and since I am definitely the one leading in tasks like these, Hendrix gets to be the 'big helper' by punching, sorting, and gluing or hold the pieces while I glue.

Innards

Okay…labeling this project with something like ‘innards’ might be a little much for the preschool variety. I suppose you can change the name of this homemade slime-like substance to ‘Halloween Goop’ or ‘Ghoulish Goo’ really anything that doesn’t cause your youngster to imagine they are rolling their fingers around in inner body sludge! I am assuming though, that they are not the ones reading this so I am going to give you a recipe for innards.

You will need two ingredients; corn starch and water (oh and food coloring if you wish). This combination creates a really neat effect, giving you a putty that is sort of in-between a liquid and a solid. I thought a video demo would do more justice than pics so I have attached one here. Don't be scared when you see how messy we are in the video, we had been playing with it for quite some time—like an hour!



I did not measure out my ingredients, I just tested until it was the right consistency but if you are particular about that sort of thing, I’m sure you can find something online. This might be fun to combine with other Halloween sensory fun like peeled grapes for eye balls or wet spaghetti for brains...you get the idea.

Creatures of the Night

Here is a little indoor décor project for your Halloween celebration. Would you guess that these creatures of the night are made from toilet paper rolls?

I snatched this project up from Matsutake which has all the instructions. (You have to check out her, Where the Wild Things Are creatures—they are to die for!)

The original instructions called for paint but we are about out of the washable kind so we ended up covering our base in tissue paper and watered down glue. This actually worked to our benefit because after it dried the ‘body’ became very hard and will likely never tear. I painted the faces using acrylic paint while Hendrix was painting his pumpkin rocks.

I hope you try this at home, the possibilities are endless!
P.S. Today the crafty crow posted a felt pumpkin game like the one i posted earlier with a spinner even! Check it out.

Head Shrinking

Every good witch and warlock knows how to shrink a head! So this month we thought we would test out our spell casting and potion making by shrinking our own heads…well, not OUR own heads but heads we own…apple heads.

This project usually pops up all over the place around this time of year and I have always wanted to try it. All the potions (or recipes) that I looked at called for the same basic ingredients; apples, lemon juice with salt, a carving utensil and stick or something to let your apple heads dry on.

The Martha Stewart instructions are adamant about using green granny smith apples, which we didn’t do and I am thinking that is why our heads shrunk down to the size of large prunes…or maybe we are just really good at shrinking heads! If you don’t want to risk it though, you might want to listen to Martha and go with the grannies.

We started this project almost 3 weeks ago and let them air dry. I didn’t mind because supposedly they last forever and Hendrix had fun monitoring the progress every day. I have heard, however, that you can put them in the oven on low heat to speed the process.

Today when we went to hang our now prune sized shrunken heads, they looks a little lonely so we went on a nature walk to gather up a few more supplies.

Then we made a shrunken head mobile and hung it at our front door.

Hendrix is eager for the neighborhood squirrels to make an attempt in eating our apples until they realize they can’t because the mobile is actually hanging behind the glass. I think he thought that was the funnest or at least funniest part of the whole project! A little too much AFV maybe?

Imposter Pumpkins!

To kick off our week I am going to post a two-in-one for your Monday morning. The following two projects are perfect if you would rather stay inside and drink cocoa rather than brave the cold, if you have to stay inside because you have sick ones at home or perhaps both!

Imposter Pumpkin Project 1: Pumpkin Patching

After cutting out a few pumpkin-like shapes from some orange felt, along with a few stems, leaves and face shapes, your little ones can sit for hours (or at least a good 10 minutes) patching together silly and scary pumpkin characters.

For ours I actually used scraps of orange felt for little pumpkins. From the black felt I cut out all the standard shapes as well as some more defined shapes for expression. The learning bonus to this activity is shape recognition, understanding emotions, self expression and imagination.

Avi (18 months) liked to stack the shapes on the pumpkin base whereas Hendrix (3 years) and I made a game by taking turns spinning for our facial features. On a blank spinner that I got in a 4-pack from the $1 store I filled in all the required parts; eyes, nose, stem, accessories, etc. Below are the results from our first game.

Imposter Pumpkin Project 2: Just-Try-to-Smash-Our Pumpkin Pumpkins

This activity was inspired by one of Hendrix favorite books (Halloween or not), called The Pumpkin Smasher by Anita Benarde. If you can find a copy of this 1972 'weekly reader', you could combine the project with the literary reference.

In the book a small town’s pumpkins are being attacked by an unknown pumpkin smasher. The problem gets so bad that the adults consider canceling Halloween until a brother and sister duo paint a giant rock to look like a pumpkin as a trick for the smasher. The pumpkin smasher (aka witch) is fooled and can not smash the rock pumpkin. In result she vows to never return to the town again.

We used acrylic paint on our rocks because we knew they were going as part of our outdoor décor. Hendrix painted the faces on using a black paint pen, but I think a sharpie would work great too.

You don’t have to stop at pumpkins of course, maybe your more lengthy rocks could be a Frankenstein or a skull with cross bones!