Halloween crepe paper decorations

If you're looking for a simple Halloween decoration I highly recommend these crepe paper pumpkins. We had yellow crepe paper handy so used that but of course orange would look even better.

Step 1 - take the folded crepe paper out of the packet and draw your pumpkin outline on the front sheet.

Step 2 - cut out the shape and open up to see a string of pumpkins.

Step 3 - draw faces on each pumpkin using a black marker pen.

 Too easy! Jasmine also requested a string of hearts with our red crepe paper.

DIY Halloween costumes

We thought we'd make our own costumes for Halloween this year. For Alex, he requested a skeleton so I used a white t-shirt crayon to sketch one on a black t-shirt. He'll wear this t-shirt with some skeleton print pants made by his talented grandma.

For Jasmine who doesn't like anything scary, we decided she could dress as a "treat" while she wanders the neighbourhood chanting "trick or treat". We settled on a packet of Smarties. We used pencils and cardboard to create her outfit. I drew the tricky bits and Jasmine did the colouring.

In order to make the blue background, we used pencil shavings and grated pencil lead and smudged them with our hands.

Halloween jelly snake swamp

As a special treat in the lead up to Halloween we made a jelly snake swamp for dessert. It's a bit gruesome but the sugary goodness makes up for the ick factor.

We used two packets of green jelly crystals, crushed cookies and a packet of jelly snakes.

Halloween ghosts

We're getting into the ghostly spirit of Halloween this year with some simple ghosts made of styrofoam balls and cheese cloth.

We had three different sized styrofoam balls from Spotlight to choose from. We chose smaller balls in the end as they were lighter and could be easily hung with a simple eye screw and string.

Cutting the cheescloth was a bit of a guessing game I must admit .... We did two layers of about 1.5 metres for each ghost.

We like our cute, friendly twin ghosts.

Recycled plastic

Our household recently embarked on a plastic collecting mission with the aim of seeing what we could create with all our new found bits and pieces. It was amazing to realise just how much plastic we use in our lives and to think that not that long ago plastic didn't even exist. We found different forms of plastic - clear, opaque, soft, hard. Some plastics were smellier than others.

We used scissors and a hole puncher to create a necklace made up of different plastic shapes which Jasmine took great pleasure in parading around the house. 

Alex used sticky tape and everything we collected to make all sorts of plastic ships and flying machines. While I can't say we made anything especially beautiful or worth keeping forever it was certainly an interesting exercise to take notice what different kinds of plastic we use around the house and what ways we could think of re-using it to create something fun.

Home made headbands

We had an old white headband at home that needed some brightening up so I bought a bunch of synthetic flowers from Spotlight. Having a bunch of flowers meant we could also add a bit of colour to some plain old hair elastics. We made the following.

1. Jasmine twisted two white flowers onto the white fabric covered plastic headband. Simple but pretty!

2. I sewed some flowers onto a piece of elastic so Jasmine could have a second softer headband. Fancy!

3. Lastly, I sewed some flowers onto simple hair elastics to add a little touch of Spring.

Hand made cuff bracelets

I love receiving regular blog posts from Happy Hooligans and seeing all the creative projects they get up to. They recently made duct tape cuff bracelets which look fabulous, starting with toilet paper rolls. I knew my kids and I just had to give these a try. I bought some rainbow duct tape from Woolworths and also used Quicksticks silver tape and left over washi tape from our craft cupboard.

Basically you just cut a line through the toilet roll and then apply the tape. You can do as many layers as you like but I think one or two is sufficient.

Take a look what we made:

Oh and while we had the tape out we made some coloured telescopes too.