The Artful Parent

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!

Autumn Leaf Bunting :: Earthy and Ethereal

We tried a new variation of our autumn leaf bunting the other day. This one is another stained glass bunting using wax paper.

I'm loving the look. Earthy yet ethereal. 

I know I always say this, but it was easy to make. Here's a simple tutorial:

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...

Autumn Leaf Print Cookies

You know how much I like printing with leaves, right?* Well, I've had this idea for making leaf prints on cookies for a while now and finally gave it a try (with Maia printing away beside me and Daphne trying to eat all the cookie dough).

Fall Leaf Mandala for the Wall

Look what we've been doing with our pretty doodled leaves! Arranging (and rearranging) them into leafy mandalas and other designs on our living room wall. I'll share a few photos, then I'm going to call it a night and go finish reading The Hunger Games!

Leaf Drawing and Doodling with Metallic Sharpies

We've been doodling and drawing on our beautiful fall leaves. In fact, we loved our Thanksgiving leaf garland so much last year that we are in the process of making another one. Although this time we somehow moved away from writing down all that we are thankful for and mostly just enjoyed the leaves as canvases for art.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends! I hope your day is filled with family and friends, delicious food, and thankfulness.

A Thanksgiving Leaf Banner

We made a Thanksgiving leaf garland today! Maia and I worked on it together, writing things we were thankful for on the leaves as well as designs and pictures.

This is something I've wanted to do ever since Sarah at Quince and Quire posted about her beautiful hand-painted leaves last fall. And then Cassi posted her list of crafts to instill thankfulness in children this past week which further inspired me. For this garland, I put a couple ideas together, namely Sarah's leaves and Playful Learning's grateful tree with something that we could hang on the wall.

I love it! And it was even more fun to make than I expected.

Maia and I started with fall leaves we had pressed, Sharpie metallic pens, and poster board to protect the table. We wrote what we were thankful for -- family, light, friends, love, chocolate, birthdays, etc. -- on some of the leaves, traced veins on some others, and just decorated the rest. Maia and I both loved this and spent over an hour drawing and writing.

The leaf makes a great fall canvas...

Afterward, I used my hot glue gun to glue the stems of the leaves to some black satin ribbon. Have I mentioned that I love my glue gun? I love my glue gun. It seems to make the impossible possible. I briefly thought about sewing the leaves on but pictured leaves and stems crumbling around the sewing machine. Not a pretty site after all this work. So glue gun it was.

And here are the finished garlands. I love how they look against the pale blue walls in the living room.

I think this one may be a keeper. I can imagine looking forward to doing this every year with my family.

Aren't they beautiful?

They look nice in the window, too, with the light shining through.

How about you? Do you have any family thankfulness traditions? I'm looking for more ideas to incorporate into our family life, both for Thanksgiving and in general.

Stained Glass Autumn Leaves and Jack-O-Lanterns

We had a couple friends over yesterday to make stained glass leaves with us. We used crayon shavings and waxed paper and made them much the way we made our valentine hearts.

These are just taped to the window though, rather than hung by string. I love how they look with the sun shining through them!

Maia and I also had fun making these stained glass jack-o-lanterns.

She's very excited about Halloween and has been talking a lot lately about costume possibilities and what people will dress up as. This conversation usually segues into a discussion about what people will be when they grow up -- as if there's a connection. Since she's planning to be a red dragon for Halloween, I think that's pretty funny.

If you liked stained glass autumn leaves and jack-o-lanterns, then you might like the other autumn crafts and halloween decorations in my ebook:

An Autumn tree for the felt board

I cut out some felt pieces for Maia's new felt board yesterday. I thought I'd start with something seasonal so made a tree, some fall leaves, and a jack-o-lantern.

I have so many ideas (many borrowed) for other felt pieces: a farm scene, storyboards, the alphabet, numbers, games, build-your-own-flowers, dress-up dolls, animals and their homes, under the sea, and, of course, other seasonal and holiday scenes.