The Artful Parent

How to Make a Halloween Bunting (Quick and Cheap!)

Want to make a Halloween bunting to decorate your house or classroom? Here's one that's quick and cheap to make, plus it uses materials you probably already have on hand: construction paper, wax paper, and tape.

31 Autumn Crafts, Pumpkin Recipes, & Halloween Decorations

Here are 31 of our favorite crafts, recipes, and decorations for the season. They include everything from coffee filter spiderwebs and pumpkin chocolate chip muffins to autumn leaf rocks and nature suncatchers. Enjoy!

The Artful Year: Autumn Crafts & Recipes eBook is Ready for Sale!

The Artful Year Autumn :: Celebrating the Seasons and Holidays with Family Arts and Crafts by Jean Van't Hul

$9.99

Would you like to create family memories while celebrating the seasons and holidays more creatively? 

With 78 pages of autumn leaf crafts, Halloween decorations and crafts, delicious apple and pumpkin recipes, and ideas for celebrating Thanksgiving, there are enough ideas in The Artful Year :: Autumn to keep your family creating and celebrating together year after year.

Would you like to see a few pages? Here is the table of contents as well as three other pages from the book...

A happy Halloween (and lots of photos)

Maia has declared this the funnest Halloween ever and I think the rest of us are in agreement.

Here are some photos...

Last-minute pumpkin carving and decorating inspiration

While we've painted some pumpkins, we haven't carved ours, or otherwise decorated them, yet this year. That's our task for this weekend. In preparation, I have been looking around Pinterest and other blogs for kid-friendly pumpkin carving and decorating ideas. Because I'm just not ready to let Maia wield a large knife around a difficult-to-carve awkwardly-shaped hard object yet. But I want her and Daphne to be able to participate as much as possible.

In the past, Maia has drawn a face on her pumpkin with a sharpie and I've cut it out. We may do that again this year. But also, I'm excited about these fun ideas I've found around the web:

Marble Rolling for Halloween Spiderwebs

We've done a lot of marble painting here, but until now hadn't tried the popular marble-rolled spider web (do a google or pinterest search to see how popular it is!). This was another after school activity I had set up for the girls...

Pumpkin Jack-O-Lantern Pancakes for Halloween

This is what we had for dinner last night: pumpkin jack-o-lanterns pancakes. Halloween here we come!

Pumpkin Painting :: A Halloween Activity for Little Kids

We've been painting pumpkins every year, beginning when Maia was a year old and I had just started the first toddler art group. So it seemed right that we paint pumpkins again this year with the current group of little ones.

Coffee Filter Spiderwebs (another DIY Halloween Craft!)

Okay folks. We have another Halloween craft we've been working on to decorate our house and get into the Halloween spirit. Coffee filter spider webs!

A Felt Bat Garland :: DIY Halloween Decorations

I don't know what is up with me, but I'm really getting into Halloween and Halloween crafts this year. I'm usually not so into Halloween as a holiday. Christmas? Yes. Valentine's Day? Yes. But Halloween and ghosts and spooky things? Not so much. So when I read Dana's post on Dana Made It about decorating with paper bats and saw that she felt the same way about Halloween scariness, it was nice to know that I wasn't the only one.