paint cut paste

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…

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?)