Make a Ghost Mobile for Halloween.

We have been saving our white egg shells to make a little ghost mobile for Halloween. Who knew eggshells could make such cute little ghosts?

I saved the eggshells from our morning omelettes and washed and dried them.

Kitty and Teddy used a black permanent marker to draw little eyes onto the eggshells.

Teddy's ghosts look like they have had a big night out on the town!

Use anything with a sharp point to carefully make a hole in the tops of the eggshells.

 

Get a piece of string and tie a knot at the bottom of it.

Thread the string through the hole in the eggshell and slide the eggshell down along the string until it stops above the knot. This knot will hold your first eggshell ghost in place. Make another knot a little space above your first ghost and thread the second ghost along until it is held in place by the second knot... continue until each ghost has a spot on the string.... and...

Voila! The cutest little ghost mobile Halloween has ever seen!

What Halloween goodies have you guys been making? Don't be shy to link your Halloween crafts in the comments below... I'd love to pop over for a little peek.

Blessings and magic,
Donni

Let's make Harvest Candle Holders.

Don't forget to enter our wonderful GIVEAWAY from Meadowsweet Naturals.

After yesterday's horrible spider's nest pumpkin, we decided to make something sweet and calming for today. We are enjoying the early darkness as, each night, at our evening meal, we light a candle as we sing our blessing. The kids take turns to blow it out when the meal is over... being the 'candle blower' is a big deal and there is much discussion over whose turn it is . Funny to us as there are only two of them to choose from... either you blew it out last night or you didn't... dah! But, to them, it's very important that they get it right... wouldn't want to miss YOUR turn.

Today we made little apple and pumpkin candle holders.


All we needed was an apple and a small pumpkin, a sharp knife, and apple corer and a candle.


We cored the apple...


Making the hole just big enough for the candle to sit in snugly.


Isn't it too pretty...

We did the same with the miniature pumpkin, using the sharp knife to score the hole for the candle.


Our home is starting to look wonderfully 'harvesty'.



On a side note; the apple candle holder did not make it through the whole meal. It just looked too delicious, flickering with golden light. Teddy had it for desert!

Happy Halloween week,

Just a heads up to look out for a super Giveaway that is coming up... I'll post details soon.

Blessings and magic,
Donni

Let's make a Spiders Nest.

Halloween seems to have crept up on us this year... is it really only one week away? We had better hurry up and enjoy some Halloween crafting!

Today, we made a horrid pumpkin... a really SCARY pumpkin! Look at it... eeek! It's not nice at all!!


It's a pumpkin spiders nest and it creeps me out! Teddy had the best fun making it... he really thinks it's cool and so does A Good Man... must be a boy thing.


We started with a pumpkin, sharpie, sharp knife, a hot glue gun and a bowl full of spiders.



Kitty is in First Grade and she is learning her letters. She was very proud to be able to draw a big 'O' for the 'O'pening!


I carefully cut out her hole with Mr T ever so eager to start placing the spiders.


With our hot glue gun, we stuck the spiders in place to look like they were swarming out of the hole in the pumpkin.


Yuck... I can't stand it. Make it at your own peril...


Happy Halloween week.
Blessings and magic,
Donni

The Ledgend of the Pumpkin Fairy.

Does the Pumpkin Fairy visit your house on Halloween night? Thankfully, she visits ours and Kitty and Teddy are already wondering what she'll leave for them this year.

Before the Pumpkin Fairy started to visit our house on Halloween, I was faced (as I'm sure many of you are faced) with quite a dilemma... trick or treating is such a fun celebration. We dress up in our spectacular costumes and canvass our friendly neighborhood, candy basket in hand. Oh, what a sweet surprise it is to have handfuls of candy fill our bucket. How wonderfully kind and generous our neighbors are. It's totally exciting to skip up to a new front door, ring the doorbell and sing, "Trick or treat?" when a person appears with a bag of candy in hand. Last year, Kitty was terribly concerned when her candy bucket started to overflow. "Mommy!" she chastised... "We should have brought a bigger bucket!" How can one dampen the spirit by curtailing candy on Halloween night? One just cant!

We'd get home with a mountain of candy, chocolate stains on our spectacular costumes, tired eyes and sticky fingers. We'd go to bed.

Alas, we'd wake up in the morning to the crinkling sound of candy wrappers being unwrapped. We'd spend another day of chocolate stains and sticky fingers... and another... and another... ad nauseum! We'd fight over how much we'd had that day, whether we could have candy before breakfast, if we could have it after we'd brushed our teeth for bed. Halloween would be an ongoing disruption for weeks and weeks until that damn candy was all gone, ingested, eaten, sucked.

No more, Folks... not now that the Pumpkin Fairy visits us. I love her, truly, she has made my life so much easier.

This is how she likes to do things; When we come home from trick our treating with our mountain of candy, we sit on the floor and go through it all. We choose our 10 favorites to keep for tomorrow and the rest gets put back into our candy bucket. This bucket goes at the end of our bed when we go to sleep... and... when we wake up in the morning, the bucket of candy is gone, Fairy Pumpkin dust is all over our room and, in the place where our candy basket once stood, is a beautiful treasure, left, indeed, by the Pumpkin Fairy.

Last year was the first year that the Pumpkin Fairy visited us on Halloween night. I admit that offering up her beloved candy for the promise of something else, was a very difficult decision for Kitty to make. She definitely hmmmmed and ahhhhhhhed. It was when I showed her photos of what the Pumpkin Fairy had left other children (cute Halloween listings on www.Etsy.com, of course) that she finally made up her mind to ask the Pumpkin Fairy to visit. Oh boy, she was NOT disappointed! The Pumpkin Fairy took her basket of candy and left in it's place a beautiful needle felted fairy. Kitty declared she had never seen anything more magical. Huge success.

So, if this is new to you and your little ones, I thought I'd give you a photo gallery of some of the treasures the Pumpkin Fairy has left in the past...

Duck Duck Goose Toys

Imagination Kids

Meadowsweet Naturals

Woolies

Enchanted Cupboard

Mama4Earth

Fairyfolk

The Pumpkin Fairy has also been known to leave handmade necklaces, gemstones and crystals, favorite books, warm orange stockings, pumpkin muffins and knitted scarves.

May she visit your home this Halloween and bless you with a peaceful return to normality.

Blessings and magic,
Donni

Silent Sunday.

K's Happy Jack-o-lantern... Happy Halloween to all!

Halloween Toadstools.

I couldn't pass Martha's 'Living' magazine without buying it. The cover is just magical... Halloween pumpkin mushrooms!! We just had to have a go.

These are the pumpkins we used and my very sharp knife.

I cut the butternuts so that they could become the mushroom stalks.

And then the rest of the pumpkins were cut in half.

A Good Man even enjoyed showing off his sheer strength by muscling the large pumpkin in half. He is very strong ;-)

We balanced the tops of the pumpkins on the butternut stalks and... Voila! Our Pumpkin Toadstools!! I love how our house looks for Halloween!

Blessing and magic.

How to make a Yarn Pumpkin.

In preparation for Halloween, we made little yarn pumpkins today.

This is what we needed to make our yarn pumpkins,

Orange yarn

green yarn

a stick

an oblong piece of cardboard

scissors

(the foot in the photo is just for decoration)

Start by cutting a piece of green yarn and then a piece of orange yarn, both about 16 inches long.

Fold the oblong piece of cardboard in half, lengthways...

Wind the orange yarn around and around the folded cardboard...

When it is nice and plump, cut the end of the yarn and tuck it under the other strands. Then, slide the yarn off the cardboard and onto your thumb. This makes the next steps so much easier.

Thread the green yarn through the centre of the orange loops (your thumb there helps). Leave it loose for now.

Thread the previously cut orange piece of yarn through the center too. Tie it into a knot... this will be the base of your pumpkin.

Tie the green yarn into a knot, opposite the orange knot. This will be the top of your pumpkin. Wiggle the stick into the yarn where you have tied the green knot. Wind the green yarn around the stick a few times and tie a bow to hold the stick in place. The bow becomes your leaves and the stick, the stalk.

Voila! A cute little Halloween pumpkin!
Blessings and magic.

An Autumn Poem.

Leaves

How silently they tumble down
And come to rest upon the ground
To lay a carpet, rich and rare,
Beneath the trees without a care,
Content to sleep, their work well done,
Colors gleaming in the sun.

At other times, they wildly fly
Until they nearly reach the sky.
Twisting, turning through the air
Till all the trees stand stark and bare.
Exhausted, drop to earth below
To wait, like children, for the snow.

by Elsie Brady

Pumpkin Nailing.

Today we found a Halloween activity that had Mr T quivering with excitement. We called it 'Pumpkin Nailing'. It's a fun task for the little ones and a great exercise in hand/eye coordination. It's an interesting twist on pumpkin decorating...

For this activity, we needed;

A pumpkin

Nails

A hammer

String, twine or yarn

Scissors

Hammer the nails into the pumpkin in a circle around the top of the pumpkin. Mr T loved this... a hammer is VERY cool when you are 2!

Leave a tiny bit of the nail exposed.

When K was having her turn at hammering, Mr T was a very good apprentice too.

When the top circle of nails is in, hammer in a second circle of nails around the base of the pumpkin...

Cut about 3 yards of your yarn (string or twine) and tie one end around a nail...

Make your yarn pattern on your pumpkin by winding your yarn around each nail, in a zig-zag pattern.

Great concentration is needed to get the zig-zag perfect...

We felt we needed a more elaborate pattern, so back to hammering nails into our pumpkin...

And threading a different colored yarn onto the nails...

And, Voila! Our Pumpkin Nailing is complete and our pumpkin is very pretty indeed...
Be sure to come back on Fridays to participate in Friday's Nature Table, our nature collective where we share our nature-inspired posts.

Blessings and magic.