paint cut paste

okay, it’s the week before halloween, so it’s time to bust out one more (or a couple? we’ll see…) halloweeny crafts. i saw this make-shift monster on the no time for flash cards blog and decided to try it with my little monster.

reason being: we already had all of the materials at home, and we love to repurpose items we already have into art and playthings. also, after doing the monster mash on jib-jab where novi got to play the part of frankenstein, she’s pretty into this particular massive mutant.

all you need is stuff in your recycling bin and maybe a few tokens and art materials you can find around the home:

• an empty toilet paper roll or a paper towel roll cut in half (for two monsters! we did it this way.)
• green & black paint, markers, or crayons (we used watercolors)
• golf tees, beads, or cardboard scraps (anything that can be ear-like)
• googly-eyes, buttons, felt, or construction paper (anything that makes eyes)
• scissors
• glue

paint or color your toilet paper roll about 2/3 green and 1/3 black.

cut slits along the top of the black part and fold them down to make “hair” and paint the folded down flaps.

hair colorist

then poke holes for your golf tees to go through. or, if you’re like us and are not a golfing family, just glue on some beads or cardboard or whatever you have lying around for knobby monster ears. then we used buttons for eyes because googly-eyes didn’t warrant a special trip to the craft store, and why buy new when you can reuse whatcha got? i had beads left over from the stash i found for our leaf garland.

novi drew mouths onto the frankensteins, and our little monsters came to life!

they did the monster mash... waaahooooo...

so this frankenstein is green in more ways than one! (hey, what are blogs for if not for cheesy puns?)

i saw this cute halloweeny idea on counting cheerios, and so we tried it out on this cloudy afternoon — a ghost tree!

boooooo!

novi and i went on a walk to find the perfect tree branch. we found a great stem from the magnolia tree in our front yard. then i gathered up some cotton balls, white tissues, orange ribbons, a black marker, and a glue gun.

traditionally, tissue ghosts were made from lollipops wrapped in a tissue, but if your kid is anything like my kid, we would not have gotten through this project without a major sugar high and a late bedtime tonight. so i nixed the lollipops in favor of some cotton balls.

but can i have a lollipop?

we just put the cotton balls into the tissues, tied ribbons around them as bowties, and novi helped to draw eyes and a mouth on each ghost.

"daddy ghost & mommy ghost"

after that, i used a hot glue gun to affix them to the branch. you could use christmas tree ornament hangers, more ribbon, paper clips, string, or other kinds of tape or glue. (if using a hot glue gun, a grown-up should definitely do that part!) then we had a (kissable?) ghost tree to add to our already-overflowing halloween decor!

ghost love

one can never have too many halloween decorations, right? (um, yes, one can. but anyway… ) i saw this supercute idea on make and takes and had to try it out with my little one.

make and takes provides the example of making tiny yarn apples, but we opted for pumpkins because, well, halloween is coming and i had a lot of orange yarn to spare.

i cut off a part of a box from our recycling bin (about an inch wide by 3-4 inches long.) we bent the cardboard longways, as it helped out later. novi helped me wrap the yarn around the cardboard. we wrapped it about 80 times.

got it wrapped!

then we threaded a piece of green pipe cleaner under the yarn, and twisted it up and around the yarn. we did the same on the opposite side of the cardboard.

i cut the pipe cleaner close at the end that was to be the bottom of the pumpkin. on the other side, i wrapped the pipe cleaner around itself to make a pumpkin stem, and even some spiral tendrils coming off of the top. then just slide the yarn off the cardboard.

cute for decorations, pumpkins for dollhouses, autumn party favors! i think it’d be cute to attach a tag at the top and use them for place-settings for thanksgiving dinner. now i just need some red and green yarn to make those apples!