Halloween Costumes 2012

We went with another family themed costume this year (since we had so much fun LAST YEAR). I was having a hard time coming up with a fun idea, but of course the internet showed me the way. I saw a few family themed costumes floating around Pinterest and they eventually led me to find this picture below - but I can't remember what website it came from.

It became our inspiration piece. My husband LOVES S'mores so he jumped on board in time and even helped a lot with making the costumes! Here's how they turned out...

Our S'more family at our church party. Josh and I were graham crackers. We used cardboard and covered them with felt pieces that had ribbon for the scored lines and I embroidered little french knots for the dots. I should have taken a close up of them. Then we used ribbon to attach them together so we could wear them over our shoulders. We decided to have Bennett be the marshmallow because he really enjoys eating marshmallows for treats. Plus, we thought our little Charlotte would be better off as a chocolate bar since she is not mobile and we needed to carry her the entire time.

Trick-or-treating with friends!

Close up of the chocolate bar! Her costume was my favorite. I used felt for the entire thing. I cut two pieces for her body and two strips to sew up the sides so that we could easily get it on and off (since felt does not stretch). I printed out a HERSHEY'S logo that I enlarged in a word document, traced them onto white felt, and hand stitched them all on. Then I blanket stitched the strips onto the front and back pieces. To keep it together at the top I hand stitched ribbon on to both the front and back pieces on each shoulder and tied them together in a bow when it was on. It turned out so cute!

I don't have a close up of our marshmallow either. He was always on the move and it was hard to get him to sit still for a picture. Trick-or-treating was way too exciting for pictures. My husband actually made his costume. We used a foam piece that we doubled up to make it extra fluffy. Then we wrapped it in white felt, cut our circles for the arms to go through and glued it all down. It was super easy and people definitely got what we were when we were all together. The marshmallow by itself didn't really make sense and neither did the graham crackers because it just looked like we were wearing cardboard. Some people had to ask what we were, but they usually guessed after thinking about it for a few seconds.

I love family themed costumes and I hope we can keep coming up with fun ideas for the future. The past two years have been way easy to make so that is a must in the criteria for costumes. Hopefully we can keep the creative ideas coming before we resort to reusing some of them! Happy Halloween to you all!

Hot Air Balloon Costume

Here are the promised instructions on how to make your own hot air balloons for next years Halloween costumes.

These were so easy to make and relatively inexpensive for a Halloween costume. Total cost for 3 hot air balloons was $45! It also could have been a lot cheaper if I had purchased the balloon online ahead of time, but I just bought them at my local party store.

I first came across this idea on Pinterest. Here is the original image that I went off of.

Image Source

There are also instructions here if you want to check them out as well. The original hot air balloon had ribbon on the balloon to make it look a little more like a hot air balloon - but I ended up just liking the plain colors the best for mine. If I had bought white balloons I think I would have been more likely to add ribbon.

To make your very own hot air balloons you will need:

36" Balloon (buy them online, they will be cheaper)
Basket (I found mine at Saver's and other second hand stores)
White/Off-White Rope (or thick yarn) - My rope was 50' and it was the perfect amount for 3
4 Brown Paper Lunch Sacks
4 Plastic Grocery Sacks
Scissors
Glue Gun & Glue Sticks

Instructions:
1. Fill balloons with helium. You can do this at your local party store (it cost $5 just for the helium at my local store) or you can buy a helium tank at Target for $20 and fill them yourself).
2. Cut out the bottom of your basket so that you can step inside and pull it up around your hips/waist.
3. Measure a section of rope from you belly button up and over your shoulder to the middle of your back. Then cut a second section identical to it. Now you will have 2 lengths of rope that match (these will be your straps so that you can "wear" your basket).
4. Try on your basket and see where you would like your straps to attach and then mark it with a marker. Take a glue gun and attach both ends of your two ropes to the inside of the basket. I just eyeballed this part.
5. Grab your filled balloon and measure out a length of rope from the basket up to the balloon. Wear the basket while doing this to make sure that the balloon does not come too low and hit your head. You want the balloon to be floating above you. Once you have your length of rope then cut 2 more of the same so that you have a total of 3.
6. Glue one end of each of the 3 ropes to the inside of your basket. 1 in the very middle of the back of the basket, then the other two in between the front and the side. Together all 3 of them would form a triangular shape.
7. Tie the other ends of the 3 ropes to the base of your balloon. Make sure to pull them tight.
8. Cut the ribbon off of the balloon if there is one and wrap it around the rope to conceal it and make it look a little nicer.
9. Stuff 4 brown paper lunch bags with 4 plastic grocery sacks. Grab your rope/yarn (I used yarn on this part) and tie the lunch bags closed. Then tie the other end of your rope/yarn to the outside of the basket. (I just found holes where I could sneak yarn through and tied them onto the basket). You can cut the yarn at varying lengths to make the sacks hang a little bit more randomly. These end up looking like sandbags!
10. Take a picture of your totally awesome Halloween costume!

I hope someone seriously uses this costume in the future. It was a HUGE hit. Everyone we saw loved it! Thank you Pinterest for bringing this fantastic idea my way!

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween!

We had a fun weekend leading up to Halloween, and a fun Halloween today! We did the traditional carving of pumpkins over the weekend...

Then this morning I thought it would be fun to make a nice breakfast and try my hand at pumpkin and ghost pancakes! I think the pumpkins turned out better than the ghosts. I just free handed these. They of course would be a lot better if I had had a pancake mold. Maybe I'll get one for next year.

I also made bacon this morning (which I absolutely hate doing). I have a hard time with cooking bacon because the grease is always spitting at me and I can never get it just right. Today I decided to try a new method - in the oven. Let me just tell you that I will never cook bacon another way. Now I won't skip over recipes with bacon in them just because I'm scared to cook it.

So here's how you cook bacon in the oven. Line a baking sheet with tin foil. Place bacon on the tin foil in a single layer. Place in the oven (without the oven on) and turn the oven on to 400 degrees. Cook for 17-20 minutes or until brown and crisp. Remove from oven and transfer bacon to a paper towel lined plate. Let cool and eat! So simple and I promise this works great.

Anyway, moving on. I then spent the rest of my Halloween day making our costumes for our parties... I decided to wait until today to make them because of the balloons. I wanted the helium to be fresh and to last so I picked them up this morning and put everything together while my son took a nap. I finished 3 hot air balloons in 2 hours. They are that simple. And I LOVED how them turned out.

We enjoyed a nice trunk-or-treat at our church and then joined some friends for a party afterwards. Our hot air balloons were a big hit and everyone thought they were very fun. All of the little kids loved them too, and they kept wanting to play with the balloons. I'll post instructions another day so stay tuned.

Spider Webs

Today we had a Halloween party for our playgroup at church. One of my friends and I were in charge of planning the party for the kids and their moms. One of my assignments was to bring cookies. I have been wanting to try these sugar cookies ever since I saw them on Pinterest. Mine definitely DID NOT turn out as good as the ones over at Pacific Thyme, but in order to be fair to myself this was my 2nd time ever decorating sugar cookies with royal icing.



I did however love the recipe. Almost as much as my favorite sugar cookie recipe. However, I used a different royal icing recipe because I did not want to use egg whites and I didn't have meringue powder.

Sugar Cookies

1 cup butter
1 cup powdered sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 ½ tsp vanilla
1 tsp salt
2 ½ cups flour

Cream butter. Add powdered sugar. Blend in egg, vanilla, salt and flour. Chill dough until firm. Roll to ¼” thickness on well-floured surface. Cut with cookie cutters. Place on greased cookie sheets. Bake at 375° for 8-10 min. Cookies should not brown. Frost and decorate when cool. Yields ~24 cookies.

Royal Icing

1 cup powdered sugar
1 tbsp Karo syrup
Milk (enough to make a thin glaze)

Mix thoroughly, color if desired and use to frost sugar cookies!

Monster Bag

I saw these darling felt Trick-or-Treat bags over at homemade by jill. I had some felt squares on hand and thought it would be fun to whip one up for my little guy. My version is quite a bit smaller than Jill's but my little one is only 17 months old so it will hold more than enough candy for him to enjoy.


I didn't have ric rac on hand so I just cut a strip of felt with pinking shears. I made it a bit too long so Frankenstein's eyebrow is huge, but it's Frankenstein right?


This project was super fast. It took me a total of 1 1/2 hours from start to finish (and I am a really slow cutter, sewer, crafter so it can totally be done in a 1/2 hour if you are awesome)!

I am so excited for my son to use it next Monday for the trunk-or-treat at our church.

Bats!

After hanging my trick-or-treat banner I wanted to get more decorations up for Halloween. I just got so excited about decorating. I saw these bats over at MADE a while back and I thought they would be kind of fun and simple. I think that Dana's look a lot more realistic and exciting, but it has been fun to have these bat friends hanging out in our home.


The more decorations I get up the more I want to do. It is really exciting to see something different going on in our little eat-in kitchen (or dining room as we call it). I have a few more ideas rolling in my head, but I am not sure if I will use them this year or wait until next year to do them. It is after all only 11 days until Halloween.

Trick-or-Treat

I have been trying to find new and exciting ways to decorate my apartment for the Holidays. I have neglected decorating for most of the Holidays because we simply have no room to store any decorations from year to year. However, I am officially sick of the same old apartment so I have decided to come up with inexpensive, easy crafts that I can either fold up flat and store easily in a small space or possibly even throw out and re-do the next year.

My first project along these lines was this Trick-or-Treat paper banner...

I absolutely LOVE how it turned out! It is the only Halloween decoration that we have in our house, but it at least makes me feel a little bit better as a homemaker/house decorator. Plus it is making me really excited for Halloween! I am hoping that I can make some other little decorations over the next week so that I can add a bit more. Then hopefully next year I can add even more. I only have a couple of ideas right now of more things to do, so if you know of any easy, inexpensive decorations that I can add to my home then please let me know!

To make the trick-or-treat banner I simply cut out triangles from THIS template for the words, as well as a few colorful ones to border the words. Then I used a scalloped circle punch to punch circles out of coordinating paper. Then I used a hole punch to punch 2 holes on the top of each circle/triangle and fed thin, white ribbon through. For the letters I created them in Word and printed them on white cardstock. Then I cut them out the old school way with scissors because I don't have a silhouette machine and my cricut blade is broken.

Want to make your own Trick-or-Treat banner? Save the images below to your computer and simply print on white cardstock. Then cut and glue (I simply used a glue stick) them onto the paper of your choice.

Happy banner making to you all!