Halloween Placemats

We went in search of Halloween placemats and couln't find any we liked they were all so gory and gross to me so we decided to make some. We cut our bats out from black cardboard, glued them to white paper and then laminated them. We added some googly eyes, using double sided tape, on top of the laminated bat. They are very simple but the kids have played with them since we made them adding details and changing the scene with whiteboard markers... have a go, decorative and functional! :) Witches, pumpkins, spiders and ghosts are some other ideas you might want to try out.

Plain finished placemat

Mr 6's creation today

Mine (yes I am no artist!)



Halloween Spiders & Web

Okay, so we are NOT American and I usually boycott halloween to make the point, but the weather has been terrible and the one time we got out to look for craft supplies we saw halloween stuff EVERYWHERE!! It appears it's getting bigger over here... so naturally the kids wanted to make something to decorate. I thought of this idea from a dress up costume Miss3 has with a spiderweb and spider made from womens stockings so thought we'd test it out. I bent a coat hanger into an octogon or at least that was my intention and then stretched half a leg of a pair of black stocking over it and tied a knot in the end to secure it. I then used PVC glue to mark out the webb and sprinkled glitter on top and shook off the excess.

Next were the spiders. I cut the feet off an opaque pair of stockings out and got the kids to stuff it with filling you can get this from any craft store, or even use the inside of a cushion insert and again secured the end with a tight knot and cut off any excess. We then trimmed pipe cleaners to size and threaded them through the bottom of the stuffed balls to creat our spiders legs. Next we stuck on their googly eyes and added "redbacks" and mouths with red fabric paint this isnt necessary but my kids LOVE fabric paint... and there we have spiders :)

We then hung our spiders from the web using fishing line and simply tied them on and now we have a spiderweb with spiders hanging above our kitchen bench all ready for halloween.