Post-Halloween Thoughts

My grand plans for an ethical and Australian Halloween didn't get as far off the ground as I'd hoped. But shifting my point of view did result in some changes and some fun crafts and foods, so I'm happy with how the holiday turned out.

When I was trying to pick a craft project for the party I focused my search on 'green', 'recycled' or 'ethical' Halloween crafts. This produced some great ideas, but I do have reservations.

Sometimes these craft projects are called "recycled" because they use one recycled item, but they require you to purchase new craft supplies to complete it.What I'm ideally looking for in a Halloween craft is something that uses as little new material as possible and can be appropriately gotten rid of afterwards - composted, recycled, eaten or returned to it's raw state. These pumpkins will be dinner by tomorrow night.

One that I liked the idea of was a Halloween flower centrepiece. Of course it's only 'green' because I already have fake flowers and some old fake bugs. But what I like is that the flowers can go back into my craft supplies, and the bugs can go back in the Halloween box in the shed. Nothing has actually been 'used up' for this decoration. And it was fun to do.

I didn't have that many bugs actually, and the flowers I had available we not so uniform or pale, so I couldn't aim for the same look. But I had lots of little skeleton hands for one thing.

And this worm that is really slimy to the touch. I like the idea that in their lifetime, this plastic crap will at least have seen a lot of Halloweens, and been used in a wide variety of ways.

Now it's time to start looking ahead to Christmas. Awesome.

Pre-Halloween Craft Party

On the weekend I had some friends over for an afternoon of Halloween cupcake-decorating and pumpkin painting (and an excuse for more gross punch) and an All Hallow's Read Secret Skeleton.

Having tested some cupcake designs earlier, I decided the best ones were the Owls and the Creepy-Crawlies, so I got the stuff for those and we started with those. Then we improvised, with extra help from a bag of lolly facial features.

First up, here's the punch. Another round of frog spawn punch...

...and a second go at eyeball punch. The colour wasn't as good on this eyeball one because I mixed in some juices and soft drinks with a less vibrant colour.

Then later the colour leached out of the black jelly at the bottom and turned it all disgusting. Plus the eyeballs were starting to disintegrate.

Secret Skeleton was fun. We had struggled with knowing appropriate age books for kids, but it seemed to go ok.

Then we started on the cupcakes. Owls and creepy-crawlies (including chocolate-coated sultana ants)

Then the moustaches and mouths came out!

Oh no! I ate a bug!

Early Christmas Special - Demon Rudolph.

And with the most mutated mouth award, demon zombie panda.

I wanted to try painting on pumpkins this year for a few reasons. One, as I mentioned in my introduction to this year's Halloween series, is having no desire to set fire to anything in my house. Also it isn't dark when trick-or-treaters come. Also, good carving pumpkins are not easy to get or cheap here. I carved a Queensland blue once and it was very hard physical labour. So I picked a pumpkin I like to eat, and we painted instead.

Can't wait to eat some pumpkin.

I blatantly copied mine from the colouring-in sheets I'd printed for the kids.

What a fun Halloween-y day! Although I think we all had severe sugar crashes.

Snails!

Another Halloween recipe test.

This was from the Vegetarian Society website and it seemed like a cool-looking idea. Slimy snails full of slimy stuff.

I don't like a bunch of the ingredients so I left them out in my test, and I wasn't really excited about the flavour. I guess that's what you get for messing with recipes! So I can't vouch for whether it would be good as intended or not. I guess you'd have to like gherkins, coriander and spring onions to find out!

But visually, super awesome.

And texturally, yucky! Slimy and weird.

Halloween crochet turnip head

I'm not as in to Halloween as Tanith. I'm not sure why - possibly I don't like scary things as much as she does, or I was older when we were living in the US and more jaded. I honestly don't know. I like many individual things about Halloween - I like pumpkins, I like the idea of making food look like other things, I like candy, I like costuming - but I can't work up much energy over Halloween as a whole, especially in Australia. Whatever the reason, I would largely ignore Halloween if it weren't for her enthusiasm.

However I was part of a LARP game last year where I was playing a turnip-headed creature from the land of Halloween, so I thought I'd throw that in to the Halloween posts.

It was an unpatterned experiment - I just gathered appropriate coloured yarns and started to crochet. I began at the top with the light purples, made it big enough to go over my head, and kept going in rounds until it sat like a little cap on the top of my head. As I started to work in white/cream, I switched to rows, just covering the front, and leaving gaps for eyes and mouth. And then at the base I went into a little circle again, and left some dangling roots/chin hair.

You can see the 'roots' and leaves better in this shot

It is surprisingly good as a mask - I can easily see and speak. It is a bit itchy though, and the leaves have a tendency to dangle down and interfere with my vision, so I have to toss my head to get them to fall back at the sides. After the first time I wore it, I strengthened the base of the leaf stems with some pipecleaner to make them stand up a bit more, which seems to have helped.

Halloween Punch, Round 2

I needed to find a second punch to go with the Frog Spawn, so I experimented a bit.

Blood Orange Agrum blended with strawberries and peach slices. Black-coloured rasberry jelly chunks at the bottom.
 

Lychees with blueberries in the centre to be eyeballs. Once again, thank you Martha Stewart.

I just don't like the texture of the fruit blended in there. For the weekend I think I'll stick to a mix of juices and soft drinks with the same eyeball and black sludge extras. I hope it will also make the eyeballs more visible.

Cupcake decorating tests for Halloween

After my cupcake-decorating hens night, we were keen to do some more, and Halloween was agreed on as the perfect occasion. And so my pre-Halloween Craft Party was planned. Today I tested out some decorating ideas.

First, I wanted to try making red velvet cupcakes using my mum's recipe which uses grenadine. After putting a few ingredients together and getting this gross-looking concoction, I knew the Halloween baking was off to a good start. Now I need a recipe that looks like this when it's done!

The first decorating idea was creepy crawlies. This comes from "Hello Cupcake" by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson. I used an icing pen for the legs and antennae, where I think they use chocolate, because I happened to find one while shopping for ingredients.

Then the bodies are made out of M&Ms.

I stuck to centipedes and spiders, but in the book they do ticks, scorpions and ants as well.

Things I learned - centipedes need longer legs than you think, and a bend in their body to look creepy. The redbacks managed scary easily enough (well, scary for something made of sugar).

Next up was eyeballs. Inspired by this lady on Martha Stewart. I had some trouble with the eyeballs. The pupils are slices of soft liquorice, the irises and red streaks are bits of jelly snake. The problem? The snakes kept wanting to straighten up again. Any suggestions?

Then I switched to cream cheese icing and some brains. I saw some on Pinterest and it looked so easy! At first my icing was too runny and the brains sunk and lost their shape. Even when I thickened it up it still wasn't as easy as I had imagined. (I kinda hate people who make the beautiful foods you find in cookbooks and on the internet. It looks easy. I just can't do it!)

Then some owls. These are also from Hello Cupcake.

Again, piping the feathers etc was harder than it looked (I've done that before though, and maybe butter cream icing is a better consistency for it) and my oreos just wouldn't come cleanly apart! But it is a super-cute design so I think it still works.

Looking forward to trying to perfect some of these designs next weekend at the Craft Party.

Soft toy rises from the dead

I'm back! Still a bit sick. What a shocker of a week! But at least there was surprise spring snow.

I have managed to get one crafty thing done this weekend, thank goodness. It feels like a week has just been sucked out of my life. I made a Zombie Bear!

Zombie Bear was undoubtedly sparked into life by the crashing of this huge branch down onto his little Soft Toy grave in the back yard.

He is from a pattern by DIY Fluffies and he is pretty awesome. It was a good pattern with instructions that were mostly clear (a few little bits could be improved but overall ok). The skill level was listed as Intermediate and I would agree. The instructions assume you have sewing experience already and don't take you through the steps in detail. Lots of fiddly little bits to sew on (eyes, nose mouth, scars, patch stitches etc) but for once I was sensible and did as much as I could by machine so he was still all done in one day (and I slept in!).

His intestines are completely removable!

He is a bit of a Frankenstein's monster as well as a zombie, made of the remnants of many past and discarded craft projects.

His back is a little plain. I think if I made him again I might make a few small changes to the construction and maybe add some more to his back. Overall I'm very happy with this pattern and project. Luckily I bought 2 more of her patterns so there is lots of fun yet to come!

Halloween Paper Toys

I found these while looking for resources for school, and we tested them at school on the last day of last term. But they are Halloween-ish, and recyclable, so I thought I'd share them here. There's a mummy, a vampire (with no arms), and a Frankenstein's monster. Here they are on my classroom wall (with the Hulk):

I found these on a good (although possibly abandoned) blog of papercraft links - Paper Pearlfect. They are designed as candy holders, Pez-style, with flip-back heads, and are very easy to assemble.

Since I did them at school, I printed them black and white. Although not ideal, the folding lines were still clear and they still looked pretty good. Printing Frankenstein's monster on yellow paper makes him look a little bit green...

Halloween Finger Puppet Greeting Cards

I've been making some cards - something I haven't done for a while. I've been playing with the idea of cards with finger puppets, and since I was exploring Halloween ideas, I started with some Halloweeny ones.

I started with some owls. One of the big issues I had was coming up with how to attach the puppet to the card. Eventually I found these sticky puffy tab things in a card-making kit (you know the things that make the bits on the card stick out? Those. Turns out I had some) but I experimented with many other ideas, including paddle-pop sticks, as with this fat owl and his fence:

He is so fat.

Happy with the owls, I tried a pumpkin-headed man and a kid dressed as a devil.

I think in future I would do him either as just a jack-o-lantern without a body, or as a proper pumpkin-headed man with some arms. He looks a bit funny this way.

Poor devil kid's face. I didn't want to go to the effort of sewing on eyes and a mouth (especially the mouth) so I tested fabric pens. Unfortunately I tested them on one felt then used them on another, and it spread more on the face fabric. Oh well. He doesn't seem to mind.

I don't think the pictures I used are copyright free (they were from a Dover sampler but not from a clip-art book so probably not ok) so I can't try to sell them (plus apart from owl number one they all have issues, plus who buys Halloween greeting cards, plus who in Australia buys Halloween greeting cards...). I'll be giving these away to any of my friends who has someone to give them to. Then we can see if the puppet-card idea is a good one.

Also, this week's fabric of the week contest at Spoonflower is Zombie Plush Toys. Worth a look and a vote.

Frog Spawn Punch and EPIC Weeding

Mum came out for the wedding and she brought with her a magazine from their supermarket, Morrisons, because it had some Halloween recipes she thought I might like to look at. Particularly the Frog Spawn Punch (If you have a look at their online mag here, then go to page 4 and click on the picture of the punch, you'll find the recipe - actually it's a bit weird but they have extra recipes on the site than in the print magazine so that's cool).

Rhiannon came up to help me do some weeding today, so we had punch during our lunch break

I can see why someone looked at a kiwi fruit and thought, "Frog spawn."

Mum and I talked about leaving out the jelly, but then found vegetarian jelly crystals and I was able to proceed as normal. Although the jelly was clear so I added my own colouring.

Lots of lovely froth.

A rare excuse to use not only the cocktail glasses but my Halloween glass charms.

I don't actually like kiwi fruit and I felt personally that it tasted too much like kiwi fruit. But Rhiannon assured me it was good. On his return from work, Bennie liked it too.

Looks like it's on the menu for my Halloween Craft Party. I think I will find a second punch recipe (perhaps something orange?) that I do like to go with it.

The actual weeding went well. Today's mission was to rip into the Blue Periwinkle in the back. I'd had a bit of a go at it, and discovered chicken wire hampering my efforts and temporarily given up, slaughtering another Agapanthus instead.

Before shot, with one slight dent made by my previous efforts:

After about 3 hours of work. We reached the trunk of one of the trees! I don't feel these photos do justice to our epic battle.

But we also uncovered a lot of things (in addition to the chicken wire) - a section of pipe, a broken toy spanner, a nasty-looking spider, some rope, some string, a piece of metal that looked like it was once part of some play equipment, a golf ball, and a crazy twist of metal wire that is still in there. Looks like more epic battles will be required.

Cheers! We earned this punch!