halloween crafting, round two

I like to keep our house unplugged at all times. Sometimes I find we have a short period of time to kill before having to leave the house and I like to try to fill this time with a little bit of creativity. Creating some fun work of art doesn't have to take hours or require a mess (not that I'm against messes, as the current-and-continual state of my home would clearly indicate) and it's always been a parenting goal of mine to teach Ethan to think creatively in terms of combating boredom. Something about Halloween rapidly approaching lends itself perfectly to crafting. Halloween crafts are the best!

THE MILK JUG GHOST

I remember making these when I was a kid. I've been wanting to make some for Ethan but found that the organic milk we buy comes in a white jug versus a clear plastic one and it didn't exactly lend itself nicely to this activity. In a fifteen minute window between having dinner at my mom's house and heading home to get the bedtime ball rolling, I noticed my mom had an almost empty jug of milk in her 'fridge. We convinced everyone to have some milk so we could do this activity. I drew a simple ghost face on the jug and wrote "boo" because, as Ethan likes to remind me, "ghost boys say boo." (This kid is channeling his mother's irrationally intense love for Halloween already.) Ethan wanted to decorate the ghost as well so I gave him some highlighters and let him have at it.

My dad has a bunch of glow sticks in the garage that he uses for fishing purposes so he gave us some to light up our ghost! Ethan chose green. As we added glow sticks to the ghost, we turned the lights off to watch him light up! This would be a perfect Halloween night decoration, too, though the glow sticks barely last more than a few hours.

THE TOILET PAPER ROLL SKELETON

I'm angry at myself because when I took tutorial photos of this craft on my phone, I meant to e-mail them to myself and instead deleted them. All it required was some string (I used white yarn that I had leftover from our spiderweb craft), some sliced up toilet paper or paper towel rolls and white paint. I drew and cut out a skeleton head and let Ethan go to work painting the "bones" white. He didn't really feel like making actual limbs with the bones and just wanted to string them onto the yarn as he went, so I went with it. Sometimes his creativity makes the best masterpieces! I think this is his favorite project he's made so far!

THE RIBBON & PASTA PUMPKIN

Ethan was sick and I was trying to keep him quietly entertained and calm. I found a bin full of some pasta I had dyed quite some time back in a bin in Tot School. I cut up some slices of orange string and gave him some glue. We practiced drawing a circle for the pumpkin and filling it with glue and orange string slices. Next he used glue to add on the stem. The end result was a beautiful pumpkin that had a pretty cool texture to it when dried!