Halloween Decorations - One Last Post for 2011

Here's a breakdown of some of the items I used to decorate for Halloween this year.  I'll provide links to directions and fun information below each one.

Feel free to follow my Halloween Craft pins on Pinterest to see what I might make for next year.   You can see other decorations I made in other posts - monsters, banners, and more.

Containers with Harry Potter Labels

I found these Harry Potter labels - a free printable.  I took some old jars - the ones on the end are made from liquid coffee creamer containers.  The second from the left is made from dry coffee creamer and the other was an old salsa jar.  The first container was just painted, then the label glued on, and then a second coat added with some brush strokes over the edge of the labels. The second container of "slug repellent" was too fun - I took antiquing medium and painted over the jar. I let it dry, attached the label and then added a few rough strokes on top - like it had overflowed.  Looked disgusting, which is perfect for Halloween

Eyeball pumpkin - first attempt.

Pumpkins are such a great medium - your only limit is your imagination.  The blue-eyed side looked a bit odd - finally decided that the blue area was too big.  So I just turned it around and tried again.  You can see the difference in the green.  Much better..either end works!  See the photo at the end of this post to see what is looked like on our front porch.

Eyeball Pumpkin

Pantyhose Covered Pumpkin

I had a pair of lacy pantyhose that I got a runner in, so I held onto the good leg until Halloween, just to make this lacy pumpkin.  I balled the top of the hose up and tied it into a knot.  This made a topper for the pumpkin - looks pretty cute, I think.

A few bats on the mirror reflect the big sweeping bat decoration area.

Mask Covered Pumpkin

Two of My Pumpkins

Our China Cabinet with added Halloween pieces - a painted craft pumpkin with our initials, a witch's hat propped up on top, a sign hung casually on the door handle. And the white you see on the right side - that's the ghost that I strung across one of our windows.  So easy and a big impact.

Halloween Garland

I made this Halloween Garland to hang over the island separating our kitchen and dining room. I got the idea from Pinterest and found free downloadable templates.  I added black strings to the top.  The photo isn't great - because the opening is in the middle of our house, I had my DH hold a table cloth behind it to block the light and junk on the other side of the countertop. 

A few bats on the mirror reflect the big sweeping bat decoration area.

Bats swooping across our walls and ceiling

These bats are great. I got the idea from Pinterest and then tracked down a bat template.  Cut the bats out of black scrapbook paper and bent the wings slightly.  Arranging them in a swooping motion is what really made the decoration pop - I got more compliments on this than anything else.

Our milk jugs for outside.  Drew simple faces on these..you can see them in the front stoop photo below. I filled them with water and a glow stick...added a little fun to our stoop. They didn't glow as brightly as I had hoped.

Kids Craft Area at Our Halloween Party

Tulle Lights

Tulle Lights

 I set up a kids craft area at our party. We bought the butterfly shaped masks from Michael's.  We cut out 50 basic masks from colored foam. We provided Halloween themed foam stickers.  The kids loved it.  Gave them something to do and they got an personalized party favor. It also kept them from being underfoot every minute of the party.  I hung up purple lights, but thought they looked a little plain.  So I took strips of tulle fabric (about 7 to 10 inches each) and tied them next to each light.  After I got one on each side of every light, I just kept going - adding more and more.  I actually think they could use a bit more.  I bought four yards of black tulle and only got about halfway through it before the party.  But, I think it makes the lights more interesting and fun.
 

Our Front Window during the day

Inspired by this pin, I made these on a whim with black construction paper.  Just cut out a shape that appears like a monster.  Don't make the details too small -- it will get lost.  I used a white Styrofoam plate for the white eye and purple tissue paper for the two eyes.  We put a string of Christmas lights behind them.  Next year, I'd like to get orange lights.

Our Front Window at night

Our Front Stoop...see the pumpkins, milk jugs and the tombstone on the right.  You can also see the monster in the window.

Ghosts in the trees

My final outdoor decorations were ghosts in the trees.  I took small kitchen trash bags, cut off the end with the strings/handles, and stuffed them with newspaper.  I then took a twisty tie and added one to the top of each ghost - word to the wise, be sure to put it through the plastic and some of the newspaper or it will tear in the wind.




Hope you enjoyed these photos of our decorations.  I didn't capture every detail and I really want to do more outside items for next year.  I'll be watching Pinterest for ideas.

Monster Craft..New Orleans Inspired & Elvis Inspired

I actually made three monsters this year for Halloween.  These two were my favorites.  I hope you enjoy them.  Here you can see an overview of our Halloween decorations and fun food.








All you need are milk jugs -- which you can paint any color...you can see I painted this one red.  No special paint - but each needed at least two coats.  Some others needed three coats.

You can make eyes out of many items - this sparkle paper was fun and it made it fun.  I also gathered jewelry and beads to use.  It really can be made of almost everything.  

You can cut a variety of mouth shapes...I left the handles on them to make them easier to move around.

My "Elvis" Inspired Monster..A little attitude with the hair.  Note the "backwoods hick home" below - my husband made the house for our wedding, but thought the furniture outside made it funny for Halloween.

New Orleans Inspired Monster

Eyeball and Monster Foods - Focus on Halloween Party Menu

Details of our Halloween Party food -- I wanted to focus on a certain type of food. So, I started looking for eyeball and monster foods.  After some time, I went with what I had time to get done and was within my realm of abilities.

Here's our complete menu. I linked to the original recipe and if I made significant changes, I am going to post those below.  

Hopefully, you'll find something you'll want to use. 

Our Menu

Entrees

Tombstone Sandwiches, original recipe, see below for more info
Tortured Squash Soup, a remake of my butternut squash and apple soup
Ghost and Eyeball Pizzas, see below

Appetizers/Side Dishes

Witch Vomit, original Pinterest item
Punkin Chunk 
Hummus Veggie Tray

Desserts

Ogre Eye Cookies, original recipe
Witch's Hats, original recipe, see below for more info
Jello Worms, original recipe, see below for more info
Ghost S'Mores Brownies, original recipe, see below for more info
Monster Eye Cupcakes, original recipe, see below for more info
Monster Munch, see below

Drinks

Blood Punch

Tombstone Sandwiches

Ingredients

Hoagie Rolls (cut in half)
2 cans, Canned Chicken
2 tbsp, Miracle Whip
2 tsp Brown mustard
1 small Cucumber, peeled and well- chopped
3 tsp, Tarragon

Directions

1. Combine all ingredients in a bowl.
2. Spoon into hoagie rolls.

Notes for Future: I just leaned them up against each other on a platter.  The effect would be stronger if they had been in a bed of shredded lettuce.

Ghost Pizza and Eyeball Pizza

(I only a picture of the post-cut ghost pizza -original crust recipe is from Cottage Living magazine, so old that my paper copy is wrinkled and dirty.)

Pizza Crust

Ingredients

2 cups bread flour
2 cups wheat flour
1 (1/4 ounce) envelope active dry yeast
1 tbsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil

Directions

1. Dissolve yeast in 1/2 cup warm water (100 to 110 degree). Let stand 10 minutes (mixture should be creamy and bubbly.) Combine yeast mixture with 1 cup warm water and remaining ingredients in a large bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook. Mix at medium 5 minutes or until smooth and elastic. (Dough will be slightly wet.) Place in a large, lightly greased bowl. Cover with lightly greased plastic wrap, and let rise 2 to 3 hours in a draft-free environment. (Dough will double/triple in volume.)
2. Push dough down gently, turn into a floured surface, and divide into 3 portions (for three large pizza, can also do 6 small pizzas). Form into round balls, cover with lighly greased plastic wrap, and let stand 20 minutes.
3. Stretch dough gently into the Halloween shapes - make one look like a ghost and the other into an ellipse for the eye - directly on baking stones (I always use Pampered Chef) sprinkled with flour.  Top as desired to look like an eye or ghost.
4. Bake in preheated 450 degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes.

Toppings
Mozzarella, pre-shredded cheese
Pepperonis - for mouth
Black Olives - for black part of eyes

Witch's HatS

Ingredients

Fudge Stripe Cookies
Hershey Kisses
Chocolate for melting (I bought Wilton's melting chocolate) 

Directions

Fudge Stripe cookies flip over, melt chocolate (I picked up neon green), and make a circle around the middle hole. Then push a Hershey's Kiss into the center.

Easy peasy. 

Thinking of doing at Christmas and using white and red for Santa Hats 

Worms

So disgusting, but so worth it in terms of appearance.

Ingredients

100 flexible plastic straws (The straws with a bendable neck make the most realistic worms by adding ridges to the worm.)

Empty, clean 1-quart milk or orange juice carton to hold straws (The straws will fill up to the height of the container, the taller the better.)

1 package (6 ounces) raspberry or grape flavor gelatin
3 envelopes unflavored gelatin
3 cups boiling water
3/4 cup whipping cream
12 to 15 drops green food coloring
waxed paper

Directions

1. Combine both kinds of gelatins in a bowl and add boiling water. Stir until gelatins completely dissolve. Chill until lukewarm, about 20 min.
2. Meanwhile, gently pull straws to extend to full length; place in tall container with bendable necks at the bottom.
3. Blend cream and food coloring with the lukewarm gelatin mixture. Carefully pour into the straws. If the coloring is off, just get the red food coloring out and try to adjust the coloring.  I think mine had a bit too much green.
4. Chill until gelatin is firm, at least 8 hours, or cover and chill up to 2 days.
5. Pull straws from container or, if you’re using a carton, simply tear the carton away from the filled straws. Pull straws apart. Run hot tap water for about 2 seconds over 3 to 4 straws at a time. Starting at the empty ends, push worms from straws with your fingers.
6. Lay worms on waxed paper-lined baking sheets. Cover and chill until ready to use, at least 1 hour or up to 2 days. Worms will hold at room temperature for about 2 hours.  I filled a bowl up of the worms and placed that bowl in a bowl of ice - the worms lasted hours.

Ghost S'More Brownies

Graham Cracker Crust
1 stick of unsalted butter, melted 
1 1/2 cups crushed graham cracker crumbs 
2 tablespoons sugar 
Pinch of salt

Directions

1. Press the crumb mixture evenly over the bottom of a well-buttered 8 x 8 pan~ the scarily perfect size for 3 rows of 4 marshmallow ghosts.
2. Bake crust 10 minutes at 350 degrees.

Top of S'more Ingredients

Brownie Mix, plus ingredients for brownies
Peeps - 12 Ghosts
Chocolate Chips
Mini Chocolate Chips (@12) 
 

Directions

1. Pour your brownie batter on top of the graham cracker crust and bake according to recipe/mix directions.
2. Added a layer of chocolate chips during the 5 minutes of baking time for more chocolatey-s’more-goodness and to help the marshmallow spooks stick to the brownies.
3. Place your PEEPS^® Ghosts on top your chocolate chip/brownie layer and broil very briefly!  If you do and burn them to death like I did, rescue them, scrape off the black part and put on new ghosts and make another attempt.

 

Monster Cupcakes

Ingredients

Devil's Food Cupcake Mix & Ingredients
Icing
Purple sprinkles
Marshmallows
Chocolate Chips

Directions

1.  Make the cupcakes according to the box directions.
2. Frost the cupcakes.
3. Sprinkle icing with purple sprinkles.
4. Place a large marshmallow on sideways.  Use a bit of icing to stick a chocolate chip in the center.

Notes for future:  Pre-pour all the sprinkles into a bowl. Dip the frosted cupcakes into the sprinkle - you would get fuller and better coverage.  Also, either make mini cupcakes so the large marshmallows look bigger or try two large marshmallows - would increase the "wow" factor.

Monster Munch

Basically a Halloween trail mix...

Ghost Poop - mini marshmallows
Witch's Nails - candy corn
Scarecrow Stuffing - rice chex
Worms - sour worms
Bat Poop -chocolate covered raisins
Kidney Stones - dried cranberries
Pumpkin Hearts - dried mango

Throw it in a bowl, make a cute sign and you are ready to roll!
 

Halloween Party - Monsters, Eyeballs, and Bats, oh my!

Here's an overview of our Halloween Party - Lots of monsters and eyeballs.

I am going to create a blog entry focusing on decorations and another on the food, but  I wanted to share the photos right away.   Thrilled overall with how it turned out.

The items that got the most attention - the bats on the wall and the worms treat.  

But, what we don't have pictures of it - I made the vomiting witch with fruit salad - came out great, so I am disappointed not to share it with you.  I'll add some details, but there is a video on the Liddy B. and Me blog.  

Also, no photos of our costumes -we went as "field chefs" - camflouge bottoms with chef jackets.  Actually the DH's island - he even made me a skirt from BDUs - came out pretty well.   

And no pictures of our guests - we had two astronauts, four of the characters from "Despicable Me," and a flapper girl.  Plus the non-dressers - the "preppy," the "ex-pat" (a friend moving to Baghdad in two weeks to work for our government office), and the mountain man (a friend's new guy, who was so tall and that's what he reminded me of).

The kids enjoyed the mask making area, so I'll be sure to do a small post on how we did that.

Another Halloween Paper Craft Banner

I made another Halloween banner.  I think this is number 4.  I may be going a bit crazy.  They are just so fun!

This time, I decided to just try to use the paper I had and play with the idea of a banner/garland.

So, I have a pack of small Halloween scrap paper.  I pulled out all the purple and green pages and cut triangles off the bottom.  I think went into other Halloween scrap paper and cut out little symbols and signs - "Creatures of Night", etc...  I thought I would do something with the triangle leftovers, but decided they just looked bizarre.

So, I played with all the cut out pieces laid out on a table.   Eventually after rearranging and rearranging, I found a combination I liked.  Each banner piece got a small black strip with an identical triangle cut out of the bottom and I put a black strip across the top of each piece - this gave the banner some continuity.  Then I took the scrap triangles from the bigger pieces and cut out a square which I glued behind the black piece. I mixed it up so the bottom piece was different from the big one.

I took the individual signs/symbols and cut them out closely.  Then, I used a foam square to mount them.  I added a few paper spiders to some of the web banner pieces.

I have to say I actually love the banner!  I used an exacto knife to make the slits for the ribbon to slide through.  The fabric ribbon makes it much nicer than the curling ribbon I used before.

Enjoy!

Birthday Treat...& Halloween Gift

So, one of my BFFs has an early October birthday.  I thought I would give her something cool to decorate her house for Halloween.  I had some leftover snakes from two cowboy birthday parties I helped throw this past summer, including on for her son.  And what do you do with leftover snakes?

Duh, you make a wreath.

I bought a grapevine wreath at Michael's  and picked up a few more rubber snakes from several places. Weirdly they can be hard to find. I used a grey metal paint and spray painted each of them in the grass in my yard.  I left a few in their "natural" color - that's the light blue and the two green ones.  I also didn't spray paint their tongues - I thought the itty bit of red made them more interesting.

After letting them dry, I spent forever weaving them onto the wreath.  I didn't want to use clips or ties.  So, they are actually woven through the grapevine shape.

I gave it to her a few days early.  And her kids love it.  While she doesn't love the snakes, she does like having a cool decoration for Halloween.

PinFail - Halloween Googley Eyed Frame

So I thought this frame idea from Pinterest was so great. And I thought I can do this.

No, I really cannot.  It just didn't look right. I even ripped some eyes off and tried placing them in different ways.  I then thought maybe if I layered the eyes...again, looks weird.

I bought a cheap frame from Michael's.  Should have splurged for one with glass.

And I started adding eyeballs.  I had eyeball stickers and glue on eyes.

And for some reason, the eyeballs didn't want to stick. I tried a couple of different glues.  So, finally I even tried glitter glue - the eyes got glue and glitter on top of each one. 

So I ripped off all the eyes and have started using them on other products. And I asked DH to please sand the top of the frame off, so I can try again.

Total PinFail - but it might because I didn't stick to just plain black and white eyes, plus I didn't start with the right glue.

I may try again, if I get all my other Halloween crafts done first.   Anyone else had success with making this frame?  It's nice to know that not all Pinterest items are as easy as they appear.

Halloween season is starting...First Crafts Done

I wanted to get a jump on our Halloween crafts this year. It is my favorite time of the year and we are hosting a Halloween Party. 

So last night, I made two small crafts.  

Project 1 - Small Halloween Banner

One idea came from a banner on Pinterest.  It connected to a blog which said you could make fancy looking banners using cupcake lines.  So, I traced some hexagonal shapes and small circles from red paper.

Then I took some cupcake liners I had and tried to flatten them. They didn't look very good.  So I used some wavy scissors to make the edges more interesting.

I glued the little red circles into the middle of the cupcake liners.  I glued the liners to the hexagonal shapes.

Then, I had to find a font I liked - found this Trinigan Font, which was a free download.  I made the word BOO 125 point in Microsoft Word.  I put two spaces between each word to make it easier to cut them out.

I printed the letters out, cut them out, and then used a pencil to trace over them.  This made an impression on the red paper and I colored it in with a black pen.

But that was too hard to read.

So, out came my trusty paintbrush and black paint.  Let everything dry and they look good.

I still have to find some ribbon to hang it up.

And here's what the final looked like.

Project 2 - Googly Cups for the Halloween Party

This one's pretty simple.  Buy a bag of crazy, multi-sized googly eyes.  Glue them on. Restack for party. Could not be easier and honestly, they look pretty fun!!

Glue googly eyes onto the purple cups.  And they still stack.

If you are having a Halloween party (or just want to dress up some cups for fun, I highly recommend the googly eye!

Anyone doing other fun projects with googly eyes?