crafts

when you want pumpkin purée but they don’t sell it, you buy a gingantic pumpkin, bake it, blend it and freeze it!

pumpkin cookies…pumpkin cake…the possibilities are endless!

making bone broth or turkey soup tends to turn into a science experiment. we like to break open all the bones, rebuild the spinal cord, you get the picture.

the last of the pumpkin activities. 🙂

random successful “tofu” made from chickpea flour and our awesome veggie turkey!

coffee filter turkeys from here.

you can find tutorials all over the internet but the idea is simple…dribble or drip paint on pieces of paper and scrap it off using a credit card or something similar. after ours dried, we cut out christmas trees, glued them on greeting cards and decorated them with anything and everything.

there is never a reason to not paint paper in my opinion. 😀 seriously though, the craft possibilities are endless. we cut our paper into strips and have numerous crafts planned.

one of our crafts using painted paper strips, pretty simple yet fun (inspiration found here).

we actually bought a legit piece of clay, softened it, shaped it into ornaments, let them dry, pained them, sealed them and made them into gifts. it was a fairly lengthy process that i would put away occasionally. both addy and mercy were happy with how they turned out!

as much as i do enjoy autumn crafts, including halloween and thanksgiving…i have to confess that really my goal is to start christmas crafts. :-p but because we need to experience all things, we did a couple autumn crafts and might do a few more. 😀

lego challenges are the best…they are suitable for any age because you can make them easy or hard or in between. you can give your kid a step by step picture (just search on pinterest for lego challenges) or a picture of the finished product or you can simply describe something. for this one, i saw a “mosaic fall tree” floating around, so i showed it to them one time (extra challenge!) and told them to work as a team. this can actually make the project even harder because at 6 and almost 9, they have very different opinions, ha!

this is a great one for the million leaves your children might be collecting or a great reason to go on a treasure hunt and collect leaves. you could twist this project a million different ways. i told them to make “something that resembled a person plus a scenery and tell me a story about it afterward.” both kids enjoyed this one. one of these days i am going to start recording their elaborate stories because they are getting good at creative writing!

we truly had an everything fun filled party on the 31st. halloween is not quite the same holiday here but we enjoy celebrating the non scary version as mercy does *not* do scary. plus my kids love nature so halloween-ish + nature-y themed foods only make sense. we used apple slices (tossed in lemon juice), nut butter, strawberries, raw pumpkin seeds, raw sunflower seeds and gogi berries to make monster faces. we used hard boiled eggs (notice ours are small cause they are quail) and sliced black olives to make eyeballs. bananas, coconut powder and skewers made ghosts. we used an eggplant and skewers and grapes to make a huge spider plus plums, toothpicks and raisins to make little spiders. mandarins with celery greens became pumpkins and i can’t remember what else. we also decorated pumpkins but went with painting, glueing and glittering them (pumpkins here aren’t for carving but are very thick walled..think hours of cutting!).

another simple but longer process project…leaves using contact paper. just cut a square and tape it sticky side up and cover it with tissue paper (red, orange, yellow, green) in any way you like then place another piece of contact paper sticky side down to seal it all together. after that trace and cut different fall leaves and tape them to your windows! my 6 year old is magical with scissors so she did most of the cutting. (random fact. when she was little, we noticed giving her scissors and something to cut calmed her and stopped a tantrum!)

no joke. this is currently happening: