Hey all! Oh, how we have missed you!! We have been very busy and it has been a few months since we have done any art with you, but we had one craft we just needed to share. When we started making it, we didn’t know where it was going to take us, so unfortunately their is no tutorial and not many pictures, but we were so proud of it that we had to share with our crafty friends.
With fall quickly approaching, pumpkins, apple picking and hayrides have been on our mind. We have also started to think about Halloween. We love Halloween and we especially love cute and spooky Halloween arts and crafts. And for me, nothing quite says spooky like a haunted house.
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.
My child has very little concept of time. It is hilarious because she knows the names of the days of the week and she will use them with no real understanding of when that day actually is. She will reminisce about a something that happened weeks ago & retell it saying that it just happened yesterday. It is no surprise then that she does not have much of a grasp on the seasons or when the holidays fall. Most of the summer Mai had been asking me to make a gingerbread house. Trying to explain to my daughter that we were in the wrong season for gingerbread is pointless. Last week she was especially insistent, so what is a mommy to do? I promised her that we would make gingerbread houses. To keep with the theme of the season, we made haunted houses. I found this great recipe for pumpkin gingerbread online.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Pumpkin-Spice-Bread-Halloween-House/?ALLSTEPS
We doubled the recipe for our house.
I measured out the ingredients & handed them to Mai. She sang Patty Cake as she mixed & rolled out her dough. My girl loves to cook.
We drew out templates earlier in the day, stocked up on candy & made our icing.
Royal Icing
2 eggs whites
1 box of confectioners sugar
Beat eggs until frothy & mix in the sugar until smooth. Add the icing to your piping bag.
As we were working with raw egg, I also used store bought icing for Mai to use when she decorated.
With the leftover gingerbread I rolled out a haunted tree.
After you have baked your gingerbread, be sure to trim and straighten edges. Cut out any windows or doors.
Generously apply icing & assemble your house. Use items around your house to hold your pieces upright and pushed together.
Once your house is assembled, you can start decorating. We used After 5 thin mints for our roof eaves
Mai helped out by decorating the tree with some M & Ms.
We added orange gum drop slices, gummy worms, candy corns, licorice whips, Hershey kisses, pumpkin Peeps, M&Ms & mini Kit Kats to our house.
While mommy was in charge of decorating the front, Mai got to do the sides. She hid M&M’s & gummy worms in the house through the windows. We gave her a bowl of icing to dip her candy in to make it easier. She dipped the candy in the icing & then decorated her face more than the house.
It was a lot of work, but it was a fun project for me & the munchkin. I can’t wait for Christmas now to do it again.
