Recyclables make perfect craft materials. For one, they are free and you just cannot beat that. The other thing is that they are always readily available. I have a huge bin filled with egg cartons and assorted cardboard tubes that I save. I had collected so many tubes, that I had to make something with them.
With Halloween nearing, I had just the haunting craft in mind.
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We are huge fans of hand, foot & finger printed projects. They are fun to make & some of those sweet little prints make for wonderful keepsakes to save & look back at later.
My daughter is going through a little bit of a monster phase lately. She loves to draw them and make clay sculptures of them, which is funny because she doesn’t like anything scary, but she always makes sure to tell me that they are nice monsters.
Monsters are simple & fun to make and have so many possibilities. We made some adorable & “nice” monsters this week with our thumbprints.
My daughter picked out a few different colors of acrylic paint & we squeezed out just a bit of each onto a paper plate. I explained to my daughter that after she dipped her finger in the paint, she needed to blot off a bit of it before pressing onto the paper. She blotted her fingers & pressed firmly onto a sheet of white paper & then we set the paper aside to dry. Acrylic paint dries rather quickly, so we were able to work with our thumbprints without much wait.
I drew a couple of starter monsters onto the thumbprints & my daughter quickly grabbed a Sharpie and went on to finish the rest of her thumbprints. I took this photograph of her as she drew, but she insisted that I do not look until the end, so she asked for privacy while she worked on the rest. A true artist never wants to reveal their work until it is finished.
When she finished her last one, she proudly ran over to me to show me her friendly monsters. They were so cute. She pointed all the differences out to me & told me that she likes her monsters to have tails.
I made some of my own & thought the tails were a cute option for some of mine as well.
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We also recreated a thumbprint idea that we made a couple of year’s ago. We used all of our fingers for this one to form spooky Halloween eyes. I showed my daughter how to press both fingers down on the paper at the same time to form the eyes. She alternated fingers to make different sized eyes and since the angles and shapes would vary with each pressing this made for a great variety of eyes.
When the paint dried, she drew in eye balls and lashes & cracks in the eyes. She got a kick out of the eyes. “Look at how spooky they are, mama.” “They are looking at me.”
Our spooky eyes were fun & will be a creepy addition to our front window.
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We began a little fall decorating this weekend. We bought a bale of hay to use both for a fun sensory bin for my daughter & to pretty up our front yard for the season.
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We placed our hay in our front yard in anticipation of going to a local farm over the weekend for scarecrow making & pumpkin and gourd picking. I told my daughter that we were going to place scarecrows on our bale of hay. She told me that she wanted to make a girl scarecrow and a mama scarecrow. All of the scarecrow talk had me inspired to start making some scarecrows right now.
Cardboard Tube Scarecrows
What you will need:
Cardboard Tube
Acrylic Paint
Egg Carton Sections
Yarn
Buttons
Markers
Low Temp Glue Gun (Use caution when operating any glue gun.)
Directions:
Poke a slit on either end of your cardboard roll about 1/3 of the way down. Make it large enough so that the craft stick can slide through.
Take the stick back out & paint the stick in whatever color you will want your scarecrow’s shirt to be. Paint about a 1/4 of the tube in a flesh tone. Then paint half of the remainder in the shirt color & then the other half in the pant color. Let the paint dry.
Paint an egg carton section in whatever color that you want the hat to be & then cut out a wavy circle. Let the paint dry.
Glue the egg carton piece to the center of the foam shape.
Crumple up the foam a little so that it has a more natural hat feel.
Glue strands of yarn to the ends of the craft stick.
Glue a few strands of yarn over the top of the flesh toned area on the tube & then glue the hat on.
Glue more strands under the head & then glue on buttons. Draw a face on the scarecrow with magic markers.
The tubes fit perfectly over a couple of fingers to make fun puppets.
We made a mama scarecrow & a little girl one just as my daughter wanted. She had a ton of fun playing with these. These made a wonderful addition to her already amazing imagination for pretend play.
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It has been Legomania in our house as of lately. My daughter is obsessed with building and has completed most of her instructional booklets.
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It can be hard to find the pieces that you need while digging through a bucket of Legos.
Nothing quite says fall like all things pumpkin. Everywhere you look, the world is decorated or flavored with pumpkin & I for one love it.
Yarn is a favorite craft & play material in our house.
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My daughter loves yarn. She will sometimes unravel it & drag it through our house and wrap it around chairs, tables and other furniture. She wraps it around sticks, markers & anything else that she can get her hands on, so it is probably no surprise that yarn wrapped crafts are a favorite activity of ours.
Every Wednesday I take my daughter to the library. Our local library offers wonderful story times, yoga for kids and Lego workshops. 
I adore owls. I have since I was a little girl. My home is filled with owl knicks knacks and wall hangings. My daughter inherited her mother’s love. Her favorite blanket just happens to be a beautiful owl blanket that a sweet friend made for her for my baby shower.
A friend of mine had a Halloween craft party for the kids this weekend. There were cocktail weeny mummies, a backyard graveyard, pumpkin cookies & a variety of fun Halloween themed crafts. My friend had asked if I could help with one of the crafts. I jumped at the chance to be able to do a group craft with the kiddos. Since monster crafts are fun & so easy to make, we decided to make monster masks. My daughter helped me prepare for the craft on the morning of the party.
We pre-painted the paper plates in a wide array of colors for convenience. We let them dry & glued Popsicle sticks on the back for the mask handles.
I cut different shapes for the mouths, noses, tongues, eyebrows & horns out of foam. I purchased several packages of googly eyes for the project.
The kids each picked their favorite colored mask and sat on the floor armed with glue sticks & shapes.
It was great to watch all of their smiling little faces working so hard creating their masks. When they were finished, they all showed me their finished creations. There were lots of laughs & lots of roars.
All of the children had a great time. They continued to craft the day away by painting pumpkins, making ghosts and painting witch faces.
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We were given a few small pumpkins yesterday. Last night, after a rather long & exhausting day, my family all fell asleep early. I was a little bored & was antsy to do something with my hands. I grabbed one of the mini pumpkins, some Sharpies & regular markers and decided I was going to make a stained glass Jack-o-lantern.
I sat on my chair & a half and watched ‘Identity Thief’ with the pumpkin & and markers on my lap.
I drew on the Jack-o-lantern’s face.
I drew random shapes around the Jack-o-lantern’s face.
I used my daughters markers to color in the shapes. Different colored Sharpies would work best, but we didn’t have any so we just used Crayola markers.
This didn’t take me very long to make & I thought that it came out pretty cute. This is what a bored mama does on a Saturday night.
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