Spiders and ghosts... whoooooooo!

Egg box spiders for Halloween...

Last year was the first year my eldest wee fox went out Trick or Treating and he was almost as excited by the anticipation as he gets at Christmas.  I think his school friends had told him about the huge quantity of sweets he was sure to come home with.  This must have been where he'd caught any excitement as I certainly hadn't made anything of the event.  The date is my dad's birthday and so that is what I celebrate at the end of October.  My one nod to the occasion last year though, had been having them get messy making big black hairy legged spiders to hang in the porch and we have made these again this year.
I modified the 'design' such as it is, to make it easier for them this year, and to make it take a little more time consuming.  After all, if they're going to make a mess, they may as well justify it by taking longer to produce the end result.

Here is what you need to make your Halloween spiders;

• an egg carton 
• some glue
• some black paint
• an old newspaper and 
• some black pipe cleaners 
• - maybe some googly eyes.

Last year we only had coloured pipe cleaners which we painted black.  I think the colour coming through from underneath the paint actually looked quite good so black isn't a must and why can't your spider have purple or orange legs?  Also, if you don't have googly eyes, you can simply cut out some little paper circles and draw some pupils on, you can make them any colour you want.  Maybe orange or red eyes would look spooky.  This year we used red and yellow felt and oldest Fox decided to make some fangs too, out of the yellow felt.  Youngest fox decided that his spider would wear a hat and so stuck another egg carton cup on to the top of his spider.  We also painted our spiders over with gold and silver glitter glue once the black paint had dried to make them glisten.

Steps:

1. cut out the cups from the egg cartons
2. screw up some balls of newspaper to roughly the size if a golfball
3. poke 8 holes around sides of the cups, I used a bradawl but a biro would work just fine
4. push a pipe cleaner cut to your chosen length through each hole or in one side and out through the opposite hole.  
5. glue the bottom of a ball of screwed up newspaper and squash it into the well of the cups
6. paint the newspaper ball and the egg cup black
7. stick googly/felt/paper eyes onto the front

If you want to hang them, you can thread a needle and push it through the egg cup and newspaper ball leaving a length with which to tie.  

Tissue ghosts, whoooooooooooo!

If you make some spiders and fancy adding to your home made Halloween decorations, how about getting your little one's to make some ghosts.  They are incredibly simple to make and are mess free.
All you need for these are;

• tissue paper
• a pen (or paint)
• some white cotton 

I won't do steps as this is as easy as eating a chocolate croissant while sipping a nice mug of hot, but not too hot, coffee.

Screw up a small ball of tissue paper or newspaper - to the size of a golfball and pop it into the middle of a sheet of kitchen roll.  Wrap the sheet over the ball letting the corners hang loose.  Tie the cotton, not too tightly, around under the ball to hold it all in place leaving a length with which to hang it.  Draw on a mouth and some eyes and you have a ghost.

** You can, if doing this without kids, use a needle and thread and sew the thread through the middle of the kitchen roll sheet (so that it comes out of the ghosts head) making it easier to hang them straight.
*** If you want to make ghosts that you can use year after year, you can also use squares of white fabric rather than kitchen roll.