Ghosts in the trees

With Halloween quickly approaching, and the weather determined not to cooperate, I decided it was time to get in the spirit anyway.  We really don't have very many Halloween decorations, and my 6 year old needed a project over the weekend, so I decided to make ghosts for our trees.  They were super easy, very inexpensive, and my daughter had a great time making them.

I cut a large white trash bag into 12 sections.  Then we stuffed the heads with old newspaper bags and used a twisty tie from a toy we had opened that morning.  I used a yarn needle to poke string through the top of the head and tied it at the top.  My daughter drew the faces, complete with a smile and we tied them to the trees.

Here are our ghosts on one of the trees, swinging in the breeze. 

Super cute, and super cheap...we used materials we already had, some of which was destined for the trash can!

Halloween Foaming Soap

I am always looking for new ideas to get my 5 year old to wash her hands.  We already use foaming soap, which gets quite expensive, so I poked around online and learned that you can make your own!  I have been doing this for about a year now, but still have to fight with my daughter to wash her hands.  I was walking by the bathroom the other day, when it hit me...why not make the soap fun colors?  With Halloween coming up, I thought orange would be a great color to start with.  This was made with 5 drops of yellow and 1 drop of red food coloring.  My daughter noticed it right away and this week she has been using the soap without my prompting her!  I may try scenting it next

What do you think?  What fun colors would you use?

Halloween Subway Art

I recently ran across MaryJanes and Galoshes and their great Halloween Window Subway Art tutorial.  I just love all the subway art I have been seeing everywhere, and I was inspired.  I just had to make something similar.  I knew I didn't have the right picture frame at home, so I started to troll the garage sales and found this beauty for only $0.50.

With no nicks or scratches, the frame was in perfect condition.  Perfect!  One less step I would have to do.  I recently got the Sure Cuts A Lot software for my Cricut.  Oh my goodness....what have I done without this software all of my life???  I won't ever have to buy a font cartridge again!  I downloaded several spooky looking fonts* from DaFont and got started designing.

Once I was happy with the words, I used my Cricut to cut everything out on cheap Contact paper.  I laid it all out before committing and sticking everything down.

Since it was too late last night to paint my project, I went to bed and dreamed happy spray painting dreams until this morning.  After dropping my daughter off at school, I used Valspar's "Frosting" spray paint to frost the open spaces on the glass.  Then, the hard part, waiting for the paint to dry.  After I lifted the letters off, I was left with a very sticky situation!  Most of the sticky part remained on the glass.  Yuck!  Thank goodness for Goo Gone!  I spent about an hour or so scrubbing all the sticky residue off.  When it was finally off, I gave the glass a good washing and put some orange paper behind the glass and snapped it all back together.  This is the final product...

I apologize for this picture, this project was very hard to photograph!  In the right light, this looks really cool, and I love that I can change the back paper to suit my moods!

* The fonts I used were:  Yard Sale, Juice ITC, Mars Attacks, She Creature, Lunacy More, Trick or Treat BV and Jack Lantern BB

This project has been entered in the Halloween Extravaganza over at The CSI Challenge