paint cut paste

the other day we had our third annual halloween gingerbread cookie baking bonanza at home! only this year, our cookies are gluten-free (GF). (i discovered my own, and possibly N’s, gluten intolerance this summer.) they turned out quite festive and yummy!

each year when we’ve made these, N has had the best time. witness our halloween baking (with gluten flour) in 2008:

and in 2009 (yup, still ignorant about the effects of gluten here, and eating it):

so this year, i searched the internet for GF gingerbread recipes, and there are tons out there. true to GF form, each one requires 700 different types of flours, but we settled on one that seemed most simple and healthy from veganchef.com, and what’s cool about them is that they’re vegan, so if your child has dairy or gluten allergies, these are a-okay! (i’ve posted the recipe at the bottom of this blog for your convenience.)

luckily, i had prepped the dough the night before and put it in the fridge. usually i make dough with N, but these GF cookies require a lot of my concentration to put together all of the random ingredients, so i opted to fly solo in advance on that one. i think my brain was on overload this week, so it was just easier this way.

well, i didn’t fly totally solo. be sure you have a sneaky halloween cat on top of your fridge to supervise.

the following afternoon, N, craig (daddy), and i got to work on our halloween baking! we were witchin’ in the kitchen!

the master decorator got to work with the sprinkles (and some raisins as ghost and jack-o-lantern eyes)

she was a patient, yet watchful, witch.

it only takes 6 minutes in the oven, but it's a long 6 minutes when you're three.

like most GF baked goods, these cookies can be quite crumbly, so pour yourself a tall glass of milk to go with them, or if you’re dairy intolerant along with the pesky gluten intolerance (they seem to go hand in hand) so delicious makes a tasty coconut milk!

here’s whatcha need:

play-doh is a surefire way to occupy N all on her own for at least two hours, if not three. throw in some googly eyes, and we were doing the monster mash up in here!

the day N was playing with play-doh, i happened to see my blogger friend’s post about her pink and green mama’s halloween craft fun book. at the bottom of the post, there was a cute little piece of play-doh with an eyeball stuck into it. again, with only that one photo, i was inspired by the wonderful mary lea (her books are great – check them out!) anyway, adding the eyeballs to N’s play-doh play was a hit.

she squashed so many different colors together, giving them funny eyeballs and faces, and having a good time making silly monsters.

play-doh is not all that strong when it’s dried, so admittedly model magic or another modeling medium like sculpey would have been better to do this with if planning to keep the final product. but it’s about the process, right? and well, it was a play-doh day for us anyway. so we went for it regardless.

we decided to see what the product would be like if we kept N’s cute creatures, so we let them dry for a few days. sure, they’re a bit crackly in spots, and sure a few eyeballs fell out and needed to be elmer’s glued back on, but still so adorable.

so much so that i decided to use household cement to attach magnets to the back of each monster face.

right now they’re gracing our fridge and getting cozy with some of N’s other art work, though i anticipate that each unique  monster will be given a new refrigerator home come halloween week…

you probably already know we like to make art out of toilet paper rolls around my house…. the recycling bin is a great place to find art materials! when i saw this project on the a glimpse inside blog, i knew we’d have to try it out. i mean, we have toilet paper rolls for days being saved over here.

first, we gathered about 5-6 or so toilet paper rolls (paper towel rolls work well, too.) you’ll also need scissors, orange paint (we used acrylic, but tempra is fine,) a hot glue gun, twine, and maybe a ruler. i flattened the cardboard tubes and cut them into sixths. (i just eyeballed it, but a ruler measuring them to a half inch might have been nice…?)

N had lots of fun painting them orange. (on the blog where i saw the idea, they painted some orange for pumpkins and some red for apples, but we opted for pumpkins only at our house. check out their apples though – different shape and also way cute!)

i painted the insides of the rolls for her, and she did the outsides

honestly, it was a hot orange mess, but i love how acrylic paint just peels right off of skin when it’s time to wash up.

after the ringlets were dry, we lined four rings up in a row, and i hot glued them together where they touched.

next, cut two other rings on one of the folds. spread one out across the top and the other out across the bottom of the four glued together rings, and glue those to the sides and onto each of the four points across top and bottom. put a glue dot on the top, and glue an unpainted (or green painted, if you please) little piece of cardboard there for a pumpkin stem.

we ended up making five of these pumpkins, but i almost chose to make four of these larger pumpkins and alternate them with single-ring tiny pumpkins (like the one i mocked up below) across the garland. i decided against it in the end, but i wanted to share that idea here incase you want to try it. if you do the tiny pumpkin, turn the stem sideways (like you see below) so that the twine can be strung through it.

these are the five pumpkins we made, before they were strung. cute, huh?

next, N helped to string the pumpkins onto some twine we had laying around. (i love that i bought nothing new for this project. my favorite kind!) when you’re ready to string yours, you just have to choose which part of the pumpkin is the front, and make sure the bulk of the string shows across the back when you thread it through. she just put it down through the top tiny triangle hole on the left side of each pumpkin, and then back up through the top tiny triangle hole on the right. easier done than said.

photo credit: my husband was home

that’s it! then you’ll have a rustic pumpkin garland that will be so cute for halloween and the duration of the autumn harvest season! we strung ours across the mantel. if you try this, let us know  – share your photos on our facebook page’s wall, as we’d love to see yours and where you’ve hung it!

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 N 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.

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

then we did the monster mash... wwaaahooooo...

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!

N 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 anyway?

we just put the cotton balls into the tissues, tied ribbons around them as bowties, and N 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!

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. N 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!