Halloween Dementor Head

Last year for Halloween the children had a Harry Potter themed party, we decorated the house accordingly and added many homemade props, one of which was a dementor hidden in the stairs. If you read my wonderful husband's blog you will have seen the post he wrote recently on the amazing Dementor hands  he made, I had the job of making the head.

We have made papier mache figures and crafts before but nothing quite this large! As you can see from the photograph I have filled a paper cat food bag with newspaper and used egg boxes and a card tube to make the hollows for the eyes and mouth cavity. Sticky tape has been used to obtain the head shape and to keep the details we have added in the correct position. It doesn't matter how much sticky tape you use to get the shape as this will be covered by the next stage.

Completely cover your model with several layers of newspaper and PVA glue, I tend to use my hands here to finish as you can further mould and smooth it to shape better than with a brush. Leave to dry for a while and it could be painted if you prefer.

However, we chose to cover the head with another layer of papier mache, only this time we used black paper. Is it starting to look quite scary yet?

We wanted to give our head a little more texture so that it had the appearance of being older and more decayed and ripped up gauze seemed to be the way to go.

First we mixed a little black poster paint with PVA glue and dipped our gauze into it. Then simply applied small pieces to the head until we achieved the desired effect.

As you can see it looks quite creepy! The children are still wondering whether to add some more spooky effects.... After it has dried you can assemble your dementor, we fixed the head and hands to long sticks and covered these with long black fabric. It really looked very scary hiding in the stairwell.

Hope you have a Spooky Halloween from everyone here.

Pumpkin sun catchers

Just thought I would share this quick Halloween craft with you. If your children are as busy with crafts as mine, it is inevitable that you will have many left over pre cut out sheets of random shapes... I always save these just in case they come in useful and it makes perfect sense to re-use craft items to save money.

This is a left over sparkly, foam sheet with pre cut pumpkins on it. First cut out one of the pumpkin shapes... sounds odd cutting out an already cut out shape but you will need to leave a border around the shape, a bit like a photo frame...see below.

This is our sparkly pumpkin border, which was then stuck down to a piece of orange tissue paper. Our craft sheet was already self adhesive making it very simple. Then cut out the whole shape and it will look like a coloured in pumpkin.

All that's left to do is add your facial features and stick on the window, for some pumpkins we cut out eye, nose and mouth shapes and stuck them on, but in others we just used a marker pen.

These are some of the finished sun catcher pumpkins which can also be fixed around a light source like a jar with a tea light inside to be used after dark.

This is a very thrifty and easy craft for children to do using something that normally gets thrown away. This could be tried with any shapes you have, but if you don't have the craft sheets you can always cut out your own shapes in black card.

Mini corn husk broomsticks

As Halloween is approaching fast we thought we would make some mini decorations to hang on our spooky Halloween tree. After the crops were harvested on our allotment we had a lot of corn husks left over so we have decided to use them.

First take a small stick and wrap the dried corn husks around one end, any small twigs or raffia will do if you don't have any corn husks. Then trim the ends to an appropriate length for a broomstick, we have cut ours at about a couple of inches.

Tie the corn husks to your stick tightly, we have used copper wire as we have quite a lot of it but any string will do.

Snip up from the bottom to give the little decoration an authentic broomstick look. We gave ours a spray with the glitter spray to finish it off with a magic dust sparkle.

That's all there is too it, all that is left is to hang them on the spooky Halloween tree when it is put up.

Last year we made corn husk dolls and a corn husk sunflower wreath with our left over corn husks. My youngest daughter has also been crafting this week with these leaves and I will be back soon to show you her wonderful creation.

Happy Halloween

Just a short post to wish you all a Happy Halloween / Blessed Samhain and show you a few of the things we have been doing. We have brought in our Halloween tree, this is usually made from some spooky looking sticks which the children decorate.

I had to squeeze it on the window ledge between our ginger and turmeric plants that we have been growing. It looked a little sparse so we thought we would make a few extra decorations, one of these was a twig star.

As you can see in the photograph these are very easy to make, I have used some small twigs saved from when my husband pruned a shrub recently and copper wire. Any wire or string would do, I have used copper wire as we seem to have loads of it about, my husband saves it from broken appliances to use in craft projects. If you are interested in salvaging your own copper wire you can read about it at the bottom of this post.

The twigs are just tied in the shape of a star and hung on a piece of thread onto the Halloween tree. We also made some ghostly cupcakes.... my daughter thought they looked really cute. We added blueberries to our cake mixture to represent 'eye of newt' and desiccated coconut for 'bat toe nail clippings'. The ghost shape is just formed from icing. Very tasty.

We have been really busy and my husband has been doing some crafts too for Mexico's day of the dead (Día de los Muertos),  If you would like to see his sugar skulls, cupcakes and pumpkins you can read here. They look really cool.

Very Large Cobweb

With Halloween / Samhain approaching fast the children have been decorating the house to give it a spooky feel and a few new crafty things were needed. A couple of years ago we made small woven cobwebs with conker spiders ( see here) but they didn't survive this year so we decided to make some more on a much bigger scale.

My husband had been pruning back a couple of trees recently, so we collected some straight sticks that he had put aside to use as bean canes next year. They were laid out to give the best shape for a web, we used four sticks and fixed them together in the middle.

We have used wire for this but any kind of string or wool would do as long as it was fixed quite firmly.

As you can see in the photograph above my daughter tested them for sturdiness. We then chose some old wispy wool from the craft cupboard to make the web.

We wound the wool around in a web style pattern trying to leave equal gaps all the way to the edge of the sticks. To help the wool stay in place it has been wrapped around the stick a couple of times and we have taken advantage of little buds and the natural pieces that stick out.

Here is the end result... a very large cobweb. The size is only limited by the length of the sticks you have available.

 Complete with spider ready to scare people.

Halloween Paper Quilling

As Halloween is approaching fast we thought we would have a go at some seasonally inspired paper quilling choosing a bat and pumpkin to try and quill. First you need a quilling tool and paper, I use a quilling tool made for me by my husband, I will put a link at the bottom of the page if you would like to make your own tool and we have used a paper shredder to shred the card for quilling.

Start by making a spiral and this is done by rolling the paper around the quilling tool as seen in the above photograph, continue until all of the strip of paper is tightly rolled.

Remove your coil from the tool and allow it to loosen to the desired size, you should be left with a spiral like the one above. Once it has loosened enough put a spot of glue on the loose end to fix it and you are ready to mould it to the shape you require.

For the bat's body I allowed the spiral to open up quite a way to give a larger shape then squeeze the bottom until it has a point like the one shown above.

Then squeeze the top down while holding the shape firming on each side, this will give you the heart shape shown above. Once you have achieved this shape pinch the two top points or ears as they will become, this will make them more bat like.

Next you need to make four semi circles, all shapes start as a circle on the quilling tool, then the above shape is made by pinching both sides downwards. The more you pull it down, the more pronounced the bat wing shape is.

Once you have your body shape and four semi circles you can glue them together like the above photograph shows to give you the basic bat shape.

For the pumpkin you need to make another two semi circle shapes and one eye shaped one, which is made by just squeezing both sides of the initial circle. These three shapes then need to be stuck together, with the eye shape in the middle.

We have pinched the top of the middle shape to make the stalk of the pumpkin and added a small curl of paper to represent a vine. what do you think?

If we had used coloured card for the quilling we would be finished now but unfortunately I only had white card so we had to paint our quilled shapes. The bat was spray painted black and googly eyes were glued on and the pumpkin was brushed lightly with acrylic paints to give a hint of colour. We are going to add thread to these to hang them up for Halloween on our haunted tree.

This craft can also be done by children, my son who is 7 years old is always very interested in having a go at quilling, today he made the pumpkin seen above on the left and is very happy with the results. My daughter who is only 3 years old also enjoyed having a go, she made some lovely spirals around a pencil. If you would like to make your own tool my husband's guide is here.

Halloween Paper Banner

Halloween / Samhain is almost upon us, it is one of my favourite holidays and it always ends up the one I have the least preparation time for, with it being exam season. Every year I say I will make fabric banners so that we can re use them but time just runs out, so this year I have made an easy paper banner.

This is one of many dictionaries we have in the house, it is old, battered and broken with many missing pages. It was only fit for the recycling bin really but I am always reluctant to bin things that may have other uses, so I have been using it for crafts. Making gift boxes, paper flowers, for drawing and painting on in an altered page style, journalling and mixed media art and herb labels to name a few things, and now this banner...

First you will need to ready your printer and find a font for your spooky writing, then just print the letters out onto your old pages. The above pages were just used as test sheets to get the printed letters in the right place and to work out the size of the flag, once you are happy, mark and cut out the shape of the flag. I decided to age the paper to give it a spooky vintage feel by dabbing a used tea bag around the edges of the flags.

As you can see above the tea bag leaves an old brown mark, good for making treasure maps too. Then fold the top over a piece of wool or string and glue down, I have used a glue stick here as it is just paper.

That's it... one completed banner, just hang it up. You can really go to town here if you want to, as long as the printer will print on your old paper you could print in colours or spooky pictures.

My husband also made a banner making the lettering look a little spookier than mine as you can see above. He has printed out the letters with added cobwebs, bat wings, ghosts and some kind of splatter effect.

This is a close up of one of his pages, we decided to make these flags a slightly different shape to the first ones but they are fastened to the wool in the same manner.

 This is what both banners look like on the wall, it should enlarge if you click on it. This is an easy paper craft all letters and pictures could be painted or drawn on if you have no printer. It is also very easy for small children to paint their own banner for a Halloween party centre piece and hang spooky things on it.

Remains of the Pumpkin

We have finally got through the rest of the pumpkin flesh that was scraped out of the lanterns made for Halloween. I made this spicy pumpkin soup with a difference... as it was a spooky time of year I have added a dumpling to the bowl, to give a hint that it may contain brains... not really!  A small amount of crispy bacon and onion has been added to the top for added flavour (or just onion for vegetarians) It made a very warming dinner.

 We also made pumpkin scones and these were so yummy they were all gone within minutes of coming out of the oven. I used my home made pumpkin puree for these replacing any liquid I used in the scone recipe. It was a bit of an experiment as I hadn't made these before, but it was a very big success... and that was the last we saw of the little Halloween pumpkins... Till next year (insert evil laugh here).

More Halloween Preparation

My husband carved the pumpkins today, as you can see above, what do you think?... scary enough? He tries to carve a different face every year and I think he's rather good at it. Last year he did Jack Skellington, he also likes to carve something in the back so that you get the shape projected onto the wall behind, this year he did bats. A little added magic for the children. With two pumpkins there is a lot of pumpkin insides to be removed, and we like to make use of as much as possible. I started off by collecting all the seeds and tossed them in a little oil, salt, pepper and cajun spices, these were then roasted for us to snack on.

The pumpkin flesh that was scraped out we have divided in half. One half I've kept to make soup, the other I've cooked and made into a puree to use to cook other things with. Today we made pumpkin pie, or should I say pies, as the recipe we used had very big portions.

This was really nice and as there are two pies we will be eating it again tomorrow. The children have been enjoying all the Halloween preparations, especially all the crafts.

They have made this banner, I wanted to make a fabric one to keep forever but ran out of time so they have made the banner using Halloween shapes, colouring them in and sticking the pumpkin faces on. So today has been another very busy day full of baking and crafting.

Bats and Lanterns.

   More Halloween crafts, this time we have decided to make lanterns in the style of the sleepy hollow ones, only much more child friendly. The lamp on the left is a faerie lantern that my children bought for me (we didn't make this one) the one on the right is the one we made. we chose some stiff black board and made sure it would fix around a jar. Using a jar ensures that your cardboard doesn't burn and your tea light candle is held safely. We cut out our Halloween picture from the card and fixed a piece of tissue paper to the rear of the cut out shapes. Orange in this case to match the pumpkins waiting to be carved.

  Once this is completed you can roll your cardboard into a cylinder and fix it, we just used tape. then put your cylinder over the jar with the tea light inside. wait until after dark and light the candle. This will definitely wow the children and provide a spooky atmosphere.  A really eye catching lantern for our display. We will be keeping ours out of reach of our youngest children for candle safety reasons.

    I really love bats and no Halloween display is complete without bats, the above bats were very, very simple to make. We love to recycle as much as we can so we cut the bat shapes out from the crinkly black paper covering that comes in chocolate boxes. this gives them a slight 3D look and they make a crinkly noise when you touch them. Once cut out, the children stuck little sequins on for eyes so that they catch the light... added spookiness. Then they were hung onto a hanger using fishing line and left in a doorway to brush against the face of an unsuspecting passer by.

   We had some bats left over and didn't want them to go to waste so these were positioned on the wall as if they were just flying past. So as you can see we have been really busy, these are just a sample of the things the children have been making.