Halloween is coming!

Our friend Marcie used to sing this to the girls and they still love it...

(to the tune of I'm a little teapot)

Halloween is coming.
I like it the most.
You be a goblin.
I'll be a ghost.

When we get together,
you'll hear us say...
BOO!
It's trick or treat today!

Sorry posts have been a little sparce this month. I've been working with the kids on stuff for my older daughter's 5th birthday party, which is this weekend. I'll have plenty to write and tell you about when it's done and dusted, but until then I remain up to my armpits in either Crisco or papier mache.

Seeing as October is here I thought I'd give you the links to the Halloween related posts from last year (some ones that might help with DIY costume making etc).

Milk jug trick or treat pumpkin pots

Milk jug bat masks

Paper pirate swords

Cardboard roman centurion costume

Gift bag robot costume

Maybe there are more that are relevant back in the archives, but those are the ones that I can remember right now. I plan on overhauling the limited catagories I have for posts in this blog soon, so that should help people to find what they are looking for a bit more easily.

So in the midst of the party prep, I thought it would be fun to print some halloween decorations. I had the idea of printing pumpkin shapes using an apple that was cut in half. The idea seemed so simple and effective that I was pretty sure I couldn't be the only person that had had this idea, so I googled "apple print pumpkins" and found that last year the Crafty Crow had linked to Mom in Madison, who had done this craft idea before. We didn't cut out the jack o lantern face from the apple when we did it. The kids just drew faces on them in black crayon when they were dry. I'll see if I can get a nice pic of them up on the wall when we have put them up.

We also did some frankenstein's monster hand prints with goggly eyes. I didn't have any black paint handy to do the more usual hand print bats or spiders, so we improvised with the green paint for Frankybaby.
Last Halloweeny type thing from this week was making a couple of stencils for my older daughter's teacher. The class needed a haunted house stencil that all the kids could draw around and cut out, so it had to be pretty durable. The really thick cardboard from the back of a large colouring book turned out to be ideal (I kept that cardboard when our colouring books were finished thinking it had to be useful for something). The shape was cut out with an exacto knife and then I put a good thick coat of polyurathane varnish on it to keep it water proof and even more durable. The varnish soaks into the cardboard and so the points of the roofs etc are very hard and will not be easily damaged through use. Hopefully it will last for a few years worth of halloweens.