How to a make a spider

Here is a tutorial from Lilo my little girl. She made this spider with her daycare provider last year and wanted to show me how they made it. It was her idea to take the pictures of each step.

Cut out oval shape from corrugated cardboard.

Push 4 pipe cleaners through cardboard

Bend pipe cleaners down to make the spider stand

Crunch up tin foil into a ball that will fit on the top of your cardboard oval.

So it looks like this.

Then remove the tin foil ball and glue on pieces of cut up tissue paper until it's all covered. We also glued  tissue paper to the cardboard oval.

Then glue the tin foil ball to the legs and all goggly eyes. And done. 

Then we made a large spider web out of bright coloured pipe cleaners and attached the spiders to them.

This was last year's craft that I didn't get time to post before Halloween. Hopefully we'll have time for something new this year.

How to make a halloween bird mobile

I saw this super cute bird pattern over at Spool Sewing and they made this colourful bird mobile. I thought it would be fun to do a Halloween version.

I made it last year and it looks much cooler when it's dark out but it's daytime now and I wanted to post this before Halloween this year (EDIT: I've added the night photo from Halloween night)I hung it outside by our front door last year and we had green lights behind it - very cool looking.

Anyways, I found all the different black fabrics I could find, velour, an assortment of vinyl, raw silk, spandex and a few printed fabrics that worked.

I realized afterwards that I really should have read the instruction instead of just guessing them like I usually do - since you weren't suppose to stuff their tails. So they could have been a big cuter and well balanced better maybe.
The hardest part was trying to get the birds to balance. Every time I glued them they would want to fall upside down - so some are. Maybe they are bat birds :)

In the dark you can't tell.

How to make Halloween cupcakes

A few years ago I made these fun cupcakes for our friend's super awesome Halloween party. They were fun to make. The pink ones were suppose to look like brains. And then green and brown monsters. I played around with different icing tips that I had. To create the faces I used some different types of candy, large and small marshmallows - cut up, fruit leather, chocolate chips and whatever else I could find.

Since I was pregnant at that party, I think I ate a lot of them :)

We were a family of bikers that year.

Last year we were a family of Mexican wrestlers. We're still trying to figure out what to do this year. We're leaving the kids with a babysitter for the party so we don't need a family costume just something for the 2 of us. Lilo has already decided that she wants to be a butterfly - it has changed from Tinkerbell. I haven't started it yet but I've been planning it out in my head.

How to make a yarn pumpkin

WARNING - if you have cats this might not be the best project for you as you may never see it again.

Seriously it's a ball of yarn and a pipe cleaner. If you haven't tried - cats love pipe cleaners. Ours steal them all the time and then I find 4 of them in their food bowl. I'm not sure why but they always end up there.

I saw this cute idea idea to make yarn apples on Make and Takes and thought it would fun to use this idea to make pumpkins. I found in the clearance bins at Walmart for $1 a ball of this beautiful orange yarn. They have a great tutorial over at Make and Takes but here is the condensed version with less photos :)

Start with a piece of cardboard about 2-3" wide and fold in the middle. Then start wrapping the yarn around it until it looks full. Then cut a pipe cleaner in half and feed it through where the cardboard was folded and pull it up and twist together.

Then slide it off the cardboard and shape into a circle. You will have to tuck some ends in to make it look round. Then if you want add another piece of pipe cleaner to make little vines off the stem. I just wrapped them around a pencil to get there shape.
Lilo made it for Dad's office at work. I was thinking it would be cute to make some for our dinning room table but then realized that with the cats that wouldn't last. But they were quick and easy so maybe we'll make them for Lilo's class.