Easy Halloween Craft

Halloween....people either love it or hate it....but me...well I just see it as a perfect excuse for some Halloween craft !!


This year I have found some great crafts that I can do with the girls, most of them are quick and easy and don't required too many supplies...my kind of craft!


I love these mason jars which have been mummified!!

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These ghost balloons are so effective...yet so simple...I will be giving these a go this year for sure!

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These egg carton bats are so cute...

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You can't have halloween without a pumpkin!!

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And possibly my new favourite are these floating ghosts.....too cute to be too scarey!!

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So there you have a small selection of quick and easy Halloween crafts to enjoy with the kids!  

I might be a little bit Halloween crazy so you can pop over to Pinterest and check out some more craft ideas that I love here....

Do you get into the spirit of Halloween with decorations, crafts and foods?   

What are some of your favourite Halloween craft ideas?

Transforming Op Shop Jars...

It started with one glass jar...then another...before I knew it...there was a little collection growing....a collection of op shop finds!

They sat neglected for quite some time until recently I decided to dust them off and give them a new lease of life....

Here is my collection...all bargains picked up from various op shops for just a few dollars each...

Hidden away (from hubby's sight!!)  I have a little stash of craft bits n pieces...so I dragged them out....I had some hessian, lace, string, yarn, flowers, ribbon etc...  and my glue gun came in handy too!

I started on the first jar by cutting a piece of hessian long enough to fit around the jar and then glueing it in place...

Next I cut a piece of lace long enough to go around the jar and glued this in place too...

Lastly I attached some beautiful pink roses that I had to the front of the jar....

And then the jar was complete....

For the second jar I glued one end of a piece of twine to the top back of the jar....

And then I continued to wind the twine around the jar, adding dots of glue as necessary to keep it all in place...

Once I was finished I glued the end of the twine into place and added a lace ribbon to the jar, simply tied in a bow at the front and the jar was complete....

The third jar was quick and easy....I glued a piece of pink lace in place around the middle of the jar....

And finished it off by adding a big flower embellishment glued to the front...

The fourth was a tall bottle and again it was quick and easy.  I cut a small piece of hessian to fit around the middle of the bottle and glued it on...

I then cut a small piece of ribbon and glued that on over the hessian....

And lastly I tied a piece of string over the ribbon and tied it in a bow....

And this bottle was now finished....

The last bottle was a little more tricky.  I decided to wind yarn around the bottle, putting dots of glue as I went to hold it in place.  I started with a green yarn...

Then changed to a white yarn....

And finally I changed to a yellow yarn...

Once I got into a rhythm of wrapping the yarn it was not too hard.  The finished bottle looked like this....

Now I love my transformed jars and bottles!

Abracadabra...watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!

Attempting to crochet something other than a granny square last week proved to be much

more frustrating than restful....even more so when Miss 5 caught a glimpse of the iPad and saw an array of wonderful creations that can be made by skilled crocheters.  Sadly I do not fall into this category of skilled crocheter and so her request for a bunny like the ones in the picture below to be made before she went to bed was not met with the response that she desired!!

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These bunnies are absolutely adorable and I would love to be able to make one...or two...or three...but I have never followed a crochet pattern before and it was like reading another language!

I appeased miss 5 with the news that I would make her a different bunny rabbit and that we would go and buy some wool the next day.  Of course the minute that miss 5 woke up she asked if we were going to buy the wool so I knew that there was no getting out of it.

I decided that my strengths lay in knitting...well that is as long as the pattern did not require much much more than the very basics!  Way too long was spent on ravelry and google looking at pictures and patterns.  

Finally I came across a life-saving blog....Jo So and Sew...and she had a tutorial for a bunny made from a knitted square....surely even I could make that...couldn't I??

Look at this cute bunny!

So wool was purchased, stitches were cast on and the knitting began.

Sadly for miss 5 I am not a fast knitter so my bunny took two evenings to complete.

Once the square was finished it was just a case of following the steps outlined on the blog...

Then I sewed on some eyes and a cute little nose....and a tail...

and abracadabra...watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat...

Voila!  Cute even if I do say so myself!

This is probably one of the only knitting projects that I have actually completed in the last few years!!  Now I have requests for more bunnies from each of the girls...so watch this space, they are breeding already...

That Wasn't on the To Do List....

I have been a tad sick this past week......yes trust me to get sick at the tail end of the school holidays.....the end where uniforms need to be sorted again, lunches prepared, homework finalised...add to that my mother-in-law's 80th , my daughters 9th (picture making 30+ cup cakes when all you'd rather do is crawl under your doona and hide), hubby going away for work...
:-(

So it really was time today to try to tackle some of the rapidly accumulating washing, the mountain of dirty dishes, pay some bills and put away the grocery delivery (in love with on-line grocery shopping at the moment!!)...and that was just for starters!!!

But thanks to a not very well hidden bag that contained a pom-pom making kit  Miss 4 insisted that we make pop-poms.....great!

So it is now 2.49pm....no washing has been done, the dishes are still dirty , bills remain unpaid,  I managed to put the cold items in the fridge from the groceries....huge achievement....oh and I managed to find the bag that contained chocolate and eat copious amounts of that....but other than that eeeek!!

So now I have to set off to pick up the girls with my only achievement of the day being  that I have made pom-poms!

Though I must say that thanks to the pom-pom kit from Klutz it was foolproof to make pom-poms.....even I could do it !!!!

All we had to do was wrap our wool around the rainbows as Miss 4 called them.....technical term is pom-pom maker....but we will stick with rainbows !

Do this with both sets of rainbows then join your rainbows to form a circle, snip the wool along the groove, tie a strand of wool around your cirlce, double knot it...

remove the rainbows and voila...!!!  A pom-pom!!.....

or a bunny rabbit tail......

Easy peasy!!  then we moved on to pom-pom monsters!!

The kit from Klutz is great.....the pom-poms are easy to make.  We found it a bit hard to fashion some of the pony tails and hair styles...and gluing on the shoes, eyes etc.. can be a bit tricky....or I could have just been losing mummy patience lol !!  But overall this was a great little investment that comes with 5 different colour wools, heaps of bows and eyes and lots of bits and pieces for decorating and the rainbows can be used over and over to create pom-poms forever !!!  There's even a comb to comb your monsters hair!  The recommendation is for ages 8 and up which would probably be accurate for them to make the pom-poms by themselves....but Miss 4 loved helping to wind the wool and to decorate the pom-poms so 4 and over if you are willing to do some of the creating would be my suggestion.

  

This would definitely be a great stocking filler.....seriously time to start shopping with Christmas only 5 months away !!


I have no idea why my photos are all sideways....they are right way round when I edited them etc.. but now they are being silly......so today you get sideways photos !!!

Me & Mikey.....

Hubby works long, long hours....so you can't really blame me for turning to Mikey for a bit of company and a bit of creativity....

I mean Mikey is always there when I need him and he has the patience of a saint.  We have so much in common and  his voice is so calm and easy to listen to...  which is probably the best part of our liaison because if Mikey is going to teach me to crochet I am going to have to listen to his voice over and over and over again as I watch his YouTube videos and play them repeatedly, pausing and rewinding as I try to get the hang of this crochet thing!

After just half an hour with Mikey I was able to start my very own blanket....

And after only a few hours it has grown to this...

Crocheting a blanket like this is perfect for me as I don't have to count stitches or read a pattern and I can just put it down and pick it back up again which works well with all of the interruptions which are inevitable in my world!  I can also grab my crochet and take it with me to do a bit while waiting at school pick ups or at after school activities.

Now to try to find someone as wonderful as Mikey to help me improve my basic knitting skills!

I can knit plain, I can knit purl and I can sometimes even knit combinations of the two!  But I struggle with the casting on and reading the pattern...and should I make a mistake somewhere along the way then the whole project gets relegated to the back of the cupboard....like this moss stitch dress that I started for Miss 8 about 2 years ago!

My mum used to be my saviour in casting on with just the perfect tension and magically fixing any mistakes that I seemed to make from dropping stitches to somehow adding extra stitches along the way.  And in the event that I did eventually finish a project (think that has happened twice!!) she would sew all the pieces together for me. Sadly my mum passed away five years ago this week so it is now up to me to teach myself some more crochet and knitting skills and then to share them with my girls.

If that fails I guess I could just send them a link to Mikey xx



So as not to be greedy.....here's a link so you can have a little bit of Mikey in your life too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se5wWKRiWBY
and check out their facebook page too...
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Crochet-Crowd/116482731742088?fref=ts