Halloween Crafts to do with the kids

We have been super busy around here lately (I know, what's new right?).  In the last month we have finished tiling our bathroom and shower upstairs (that used to be a closet) and we put in wood floors for the whole upstairs and hosted a birthday party and Brunswick stew for 60 people!! Sooo, I haven't been feeling too crafty lately (though I do plan to do at least 1 craft with the kids before Halloween).

I did want to share 2 cool crafts that we did last year for anyone looking for last minute ideas, something that is sturdy, long lasting and can be brought back out year after year.

Halloween Jars

Our Halloween lighted jars as I displayed them this year.  I only used a strand of 50 clear lights, though with this number of jars I realized that a strand of 100 would have worked better.

At the beginning of the month I pulled out our Halloween jars again.  We made them last year and I LOVE these things!!  I love how festive they are, I love how cozy they make the house feel and the amount of light they put out is perfect . . . they are just fun to have around.  Here is the post from last year where I talk about how we make them.  Lighted Halloween Jars

 Skeleton Door Man

I call him that because he sits at our front door to greet people

We also made a PVC pipe skeleton man last year.  He sits on the front porch.  I got this idea from Family Fun General Bone E Part    What I like about this craft is that you can take it apart, throw it in a bag, and put it back together next year.  Also though definitely not anatomically correct, you can use it to teach a little about bones and joints as the kids work it like a puzzle to put it together.  It is a bit more involved than the jars, well, meaning that you have to buy the pipe, pieces, and then figure out cutting and assembly (and we didn't follow the directions exactly, because we never do, LOL) but it was easy considering the result, and super easy to put away and pull back out for this year.

Now I leave you with a view of autumn at the Mason household

3 boys jumping on a wet trampoline, covered in wet leaves, in their bathing suites . . . I will not share how hard it is to remove crushed wet leaves from hair, clothes, carpet etc ;0)

Lighted Halloween Jars . . . and other spooky stuf!!

We made these a few wks ago and I have been trying to get them up here to show y'all but I am still having a hard time finding time to blog.

I got this idea last year when I saw the lighted jars at the Not So Idle Hands blog HERE  SO CUTE!!  But alas, I was too late for Halloween, so instead I made Christmas Jars.  Some of you may remember them, I blogged about them HERE.  They turned out great and the kids had a ball making them.  In fact we are going to have to make more this year because we gave a bunch of them away as gifts last year.

I was very excited though as Halloween came around again so we could do some Halloween jars.  We made them the same way we did the Christmas jars.  They are pretty easy to make, but beware they are a tad time consuming and can be messy.  Though I was doing them with 4 kids so that will take longer.  My oldest two (10 and 8) could do much of it themselves, I helped with cutting and stuff, but the younger 2 needed some help with the Mod Podge. And since you have to do multiple layers it does take some time.  But it is worth it!!

I'll go over the instructions again for those interested.

Materials

• Glass Jars (I save all our peanut butter, pickle, pasta jars etc. so we never have a shortage of these)
• Tissue Paper (I chose white, orange, black, and green for Halloween, but you can also find holiday paper that you can use as well, then yo don't even really have to decorate it, just decoupage it on)
• Mod Podge or some other type of decoupage 'glue'
• A brush to brush the glue on
• Construction Paper or anything else the kids may want to decorate it with (we have used glitter, stamped paper shapes etc.)

Decorating

First you want to cut your tissue paper in strips, then cover your jar with a layer of Mod Podge.   We usually cover just a small section at a time, applying the Mod Podge then the tissue paper till the whole jar is covered.
To make the pumpkins more 'pumpkin like' we did the strips vertically but in the past we have done them horizontally too.  For some of the other jars, I just let the kids put the strips on however they wanted.

 Piper, Arah and Ever adding tissue paper to their pumpkin jars

(notice the dummy hanging from the rafters of the porch in the window behind Piper . . . 

Charlie made this with the kids just a few days before . . . he is creepy!!)

 Once you have the whole jar covered with the paper (and have trimmed off the excess on top and bottom) do another generous layer of Mod Podge over the whole thing, making sure to cover all the tissue paper with a protective layer.  It is delicate so take care (and tell your kids to be extra gentle).

Once you have done that, then decorate as you wish.  Each of the kids designed their own pumpkin face, then they got to do another jar however they  liked.

Piper and Ever putting tissue paper on their 2nd jars.

Piper (8) drew and colored some black cats (one she colored very dark black, the other she drew on black construction paper and cut out) and we put them on top of her purple jar (with black construction paper stripes on top and bottom) for a silhouette.  Xian (10) did a green Frankenstein.  He used black construction paper for the face and hair.  Arah (6) drew a lot of ghosts and things that he thought were 'scary' out of plain white paper, and then cut them out and put them on his purple/black striped jar.  And Ever (3) made a purple jar too, but he added squares of other colors of tissue paper over that along with a few cut outs.  I made the white ghost.
Make sure you do a coat of mod podge over any additions to your jars.

You can use anything to light them.  Being glass, candles will work.  You can also use battery operated tea lights (I have heard that you can get them at the dollar store 2 in a pack).  I have them all lined up so using a string of lights is easiest.  Usually I will use white but apparently those were like in the bottom of the Christmas box and not so easy for Charlie to get, so we used multicolored instead and they worked fine.

For some reason my pictures of these jars didn't turn out as good as the ones I took of the Christmas jars last year, but you get the general idea.

We had a Halloween party with our local natural families group (love those guys!!).  The kids always have a ball!  We had pinatas, crafts, games, lots of goodies (we made halloween shaped sugar cookies).  Thank goodness we have friends with large houses and generous hearts who are willing to host our bi-weekly gatherings and potlucks (which can sometimes get VERY large).

 Xian (monster) Arah (ninja) Ever (lake monster) Piper (witch) and Thrace (giraffe) 

and our homemade skeleton man (made with PVC pipes, we got info from the Family Fun website)

Hope YOU have a great Fall season!!

Homemade Natural Playdough

OK if you are brave (like me) then you give in and let your kids play with playdough despite the huge mess it makes!  And there is no denying that it makes a mess . . . pretty much every time!  But they just love it so much!  My kids have always loved it and lately they have been loving playing with their pokemon figurines in the playdough.

 
If you are thrifty (like me) then you like to make your own playdough.  I started making playdough like 15 yrs ago when I worked at an Early Learning Center (long before having my own kids).  I have seen many, many recipes on the web and I have tried many.  I like to stay away from Alum which many recipes use.  But the ones that use Cream of Tartar call for SO much of it that it seems almost wasteful.  And the natural recipes I came across talked about using natural food colorings or making your own natural food coloring to add to the playdough after it was finished and that seemed too complicated.  

So I decided to kind of wing it and take some ideas from several recipes and come up with something easy and still natural . . . and to my surprise . . . it worked!! 

What I did was start with a good recipe I knew worked.  They all call for water, so instead of water in the recipe I replaced it with some type of natural liquid that was colored. 
Then I used less cream of tarter than what is usually called for (trying to conserve it) and it turned out great!!
Here is the final recipe I came up with.  I am giving you the full recipe but after my first batch I ended up cutting it in 1/2 because I had a lot of different colors I wanted to try.  Most of the pictures you see here are of this recipe cut in 1/2 and it still makes a nice sized ball of dough.

The Recipe

• 1 cup of flour
• 1/2 cup of salt
• 1 cup of liquid*
• 2 Tbsp Oil
• 1 Tbsp Cream of Tartar

* For liquid I used what I happened to have on hand that would make color.  I used raspberry juice concentrate, grape juice (either full strength or diluted if I thought it was needed) blueberry juice (from boiling blueberries) strong tea (coffee would have worked too).  I also used paprika and cocoa, which I just mixed in with some water.  If I would have had some liquid chlorophyll (or even spinach that I could have boiled to make green water) it would have rocked the green!!  Next time.  Not sure what I would use for blue but really, you can use anything.   Some more ideas, carrot juice, beet juice, shoot any juice you have on hand or any liquid left after boiling veggies or whatever can be used in place of water, and any powder (herb, spice etc) as well.  The raspberry, grape and blueberry turned out very similar in color, just slightly different shades. 

In a pot, mix the flour, salt, cream of tartar, and oil . . . slowly add your liquid

Put your pot over med heat and stir.  As it warms up it will start to thicken.

Continue to stir until the dough gets thick, forms a ball and separates from the sides and bottom of the pan.

Turn onto something like wax paper or floured surface.  Keep in mind that it is hot!!

As it cools you can kneed it to a nice smooth consistency (the kids are usually anxious to help with this part)

For these I added cocoa (left) and paprika (right) to the mix

I was concerned that using juices and stuff would make it go bad quicker, and you can always store it in the fridge if needed.  But I made this stuff over a month ago and it is still good.  I keep it in ziplock sandwich bags and make sure that I squeeze all the air out.  It still works great after a month (homemade playdough usually lasts several months for me).  If it starts to get a bit dry just put some oil on your hands before playing with it.

Paprika

Grape Juice

Cocoa

Blueberry Juice

Tea

Raspberry Juice

ENJOY!!

Spaghetti Tacos

If any of you have older kids who watch the show I Carly then you know what these are!  I don't know what took us so long to make them but one day Charlie just said hey, lets make spaghetti tacos!  So of course the kids were all about it!

I had wanted to just do them like regular tacos, but put the spaghetti on the bottom. So it would have been spaghetti with tomatoes and lettuce and cheese on top etc. (maybe some salsa too, who knows) but Charlie thought it best to just stuff tacos with spaghetti.  He was probably right, well meaning that surely the kids would prefer that.  So that is what we did.

We cooked up some regular spaghetti, added to it sauce and ground beef and mixed it all up in a large bowl
Then we took some hard taco shells and stuffed it with the pre-mixed spaghetti, and then sprinkled some cheese on top.

That's it!  Super easy!

The kids LOVED it! (as you can see below) It was a fun meal and it was surprisingly good.  I mean it was really good!  Who would have thought that spaghetti in taco shells would be so tasty!

Hairy Hot Dogs

 Or as the kids have been calling them, squid dogs (on the count of they look like squid)!  Sounds gross but it is a really cool twist to the traditional hot dog (and spaghetti for that matter).  I saw them in the latest issue of Family Fun Magazine and after having a stomach bug last week (always fun right?) I figured we were due for something special.

They are super easy to make (takes a bit longer than regular hot dogs or spaghetti) and the kids LOVE them!!

All you have to do is . . . .

• Cut
• Insert
• Boil
• Enjoy

 Cut your hot dogs into pieces.  I did 5 pieces per dog but you could do more or less.

 

Insert uncooked spaghetti into the hot dog pieces. 

  

The kids had fun with this which definitely saved me time (I was shoving like 3 in at a time to go quicker).  

  

We did like 5-7 strands of spaghetti per piece.  You could do less.  I guess it depends on how much pasta you want.  It ended up being quite a load of spaghetti.

  

Then boil.  I just boiled according to the spaghetti instructions.

  

Enjoy!!

  

As you see the kids had fun eating this!

  

We just ate them like we would regular hot dogs, they had ketchup to dip them in.  But you could totally serve it like spaghetti (especially if you use a lot of spaghetti like we did) and do it in a bowl with pasta sauce (assuming you can keep their fingers out of it, LOL).

  

 The kids are drinking Tibicos (aka water kefir lemonade . . . more on that in another post)

Thrace absolutely freaked out and threw his apple on the floor when he saw them, so I had to give him some.  He preferred the hot dog unfortunately (wasn't really planning on feeding him hot dog at 8mo but he was screaming for it) 

 

We don't do hot dogs often, but this will definitely be the way we do them from now on!!