Our Halloween!

Happy Halloween! Here is our little guy in his first costume... he was such a trooper! It was a REALLY warm costume, and he runs hot like his daddy as it is... he put up with pictures and visits with grandmas and grandpas!

What a weekend! I am pooped! Right now, we only see Josh's girls on the weekends. So when they are here, we jam pack a lot into our days sometimes. This weekend was no exception. Saturday we picked out our pumpkins, made cookies to decorate and of course carved our pumpkins. We also had to watch the Shrek Halloween special and the Charlie Brown Pumpkin Patch Classic. Here are some highlights:

I have never made cookie dough for cookie cutters... so I went onto the trusty allrecipes.com website and found this recipe. I made it in the morning before we headed out to run errands and by the time we were ready to make cookies about 3 hrs later, it was good to go. They were super yummy too, so I'd highly recommend the recipe!

Once they cooled, we were good to go with decorating.. the best part. These cookies ended up NOT being passed around to family after Kali and Mackenzie had such a good time licking their fingers after every single cookie. LOL we'll keep our germs in the house thanks!

As a side note I had a moment of brilliance after we put the last batch of cookies in the oven. Mackenzie is a difficult, picky eater. It's a daily battle. Well since we already had the table covered in flour, we decided it would be a great night to make pizzas. I was rolling out the dough for the girl's pizza and thought hmmm.. yep! You can use cookie cutters on pizza dough! The girls loved it! I was so tickled at the idea, the next morning we had Halloween shaped pancakes too.... (enter Josh's eye roll here). Hey at least we got our money's worth out of the Halloween cookie cutters!


Anyway, onto the pumpkins. Every year I egg the girls on, to get the biggest pumpkins they can find. I always do this in a moment of stupidity, forgetting that I live in a house full of sissies who refuse to touch 'icky pumpkin guts'... so after I gutted 5 (ugh!) pumpkins, they were ready to carve!

Jack helped!

Halloween Candy Jars

As Halloween got closer I knew I wanted to do something small for the people I work with. Nothing major, just something fun to make them stop and smile for a second. I saw this idea for Halloween candy Jars on the Sassy Sanctuary blog. I changed it up a little to meet my needs, but the concept was the same!

This was such a simple project. I just bought mini mason jars, and some glass paint. Here's where I pulled a "megan" and goofed. It was a last minute decision to get the glass paint so I grabbed what I thought was black and headed for the line at Joanns. Once I got home, I realized I picked up "pewter" instead! I was able to come up with a quick fix: once the glass paint dried I just went over it all with black acrylic paint. No one will ever know!

I traced the discs from the lids on the back of some left over fabric scraps I had from this project and "mod-podged" them to the lids.

Next I painted the outside of the lids black. This is when I realized it would have been totally worth it to invest in a can of spray paint (if I recall, the tutorial I pulled this from made the same comment!).... 50 coats of acrylic (ok maybe like 5) paint later, there were still some spots showing through. I tied a ribbon around it and called it a day!

(Yay for finally remembering to use my camera!)

Halloween Rag Wreath

When I found this Halloween Rag Wreath on the Sassy Sanctuary blog, I fell in love! It is so cute, and extra perk: it was way easy!! (Side note: There are like 50 things on the Sassy Sanctuary blog I'm dying to try... check it out when you have a minute, so many cute things! )

I loved it so much, I actually made 2. The first one turned out adorable, and Pattie (aka Nana!) seemed to agree so it felt right to hand it on over and make another! I skipped the black bow on both because I could not find cute black ribbon anywhere. 2 weeks before Halloween?! Whats up with that.

The process is really easy. These handy wire wreaths came in a few sizes, but having 4 rows really lets you get the wreath looking full. I bought 2 and a half yards of each. (Sassy's blog actually suggests 1 and a half but in Joanns, I was SURE it was 2!) So I had LOTS left over, hence my making two! Anyway, cut them down to 1x6inch strips and just begin tying them to the wreath... I was lazy and single knotted, but if you have the patience you'd probably be smart to double knot them so none slip out! After each row I'd change which fabric I started with so the pattern was random throughout.

After you paint your letters (I wished I had some glitter to add to them!) hot glue a bobby pin to the back to act as a hook, and you can secure them to the wreath. Way fun!!

Apologies for using camera phone pictures... not enough hours in the day!! I snapped these quick shots this morning while Josh was loading Jack up in the car and then we were off!

This was the wreath I ended up giving to Pattie.

This one ended up on our front porch!

I love Halloween! :)

Spooky Halloween Jars

I have been impatiently waiting for the girls to arrive this last weekend so we could try out a new craft I had found. I found these painted luminaries from Crafts By Amanda. Once I saw how simple they were I figured we had to try them out!

If I was more on my game, I would have pictures of the process including showing the girls having fun painting, but..... I forgot. :) We ran out of tea lights so not all are lit, but you get the idea! Super cute!

These came together really fast. All you need is some mason jars and acrylic craft paint. Side note: I was kind of surprised to find that Joanns didn't carry mason jars... however, Ralphs (next door to our Joanns) had them, 12 for $10. Not too bad!

Back to the jars. We did one layer of paint. I agreed with the blog I pulled this from that they looked more authentic and spooky to not be perfect and solid colored. I really like the way the glass still shines thru on some parts. Once the paint was dry we used a sharpie to draw on faces, then filled it in with black paint. One coat of a shiny sealer later and you are good to go! I love the way they turned out!

In other news, we went to the Calabasas Pumpkin Festival this weekend. The rain stopped for a few hours so we really lucked out. It was a blast!! Here are some pics: