Easy Halloween Crafts for Toddlers

I LOVE Halloween. It is slowly getting more and more popular (or maybe just commercialized?) every year here in the UK which makes me happy. We are going to be in the USA for Halloween (yay!) but I still wanted to do some fun Halloween crafts with Blondie Boy before we left. It didn't make sense to carve a pumpkin since we'd be leaving and also since he's a toddler I don't exactly trust him with sharp knives. So we painted a Jack O Lantern.

The hardest part was my portion which was taping on the Jack O Lantern's face. I just took some masking tape, overlapped strips and made giant squares to then cut out the shapes I wanted. The eyes and nose were easy but the mouth was a little bit more fiddly.

Then I just let Blondie Boy go to town with some poster paints and he painted all over the pumpkin. Once it was dry I peeled off the tape to reveal the "carved" Jack O Lantern face. 

Blondie Boy is a boy after his Mom's heart and had me add some glitter to the eyes, nose and mouth. It actually kind of mimics the flicker of a candle so I think it turned out pretty cool.

He is so proud of it and always talks about "his pumpkin" when we pull in the driveway.

Since the pumpkin went so well we decided to make some hand Spiders that I saw on Kismet's Fate's Instagram. Again super easy but possibly messy--what craft involving paint isn't messy with a toddler? 

Paint one of your toddler's hands and have them make handprints on a bit of card stock or poster board. Then paint their other hand and make another handprint next to it making sure the thumbs over lap.

Let the hand prints dry and then cut around the hand spiders. It is quite curvy so depending on how good your child is with scissors they could do this themselves or you can do it. 

Then glue on googly eyes. I found it was a lot easier for Blondie Boy to glue on the larger eyes so we used them so he could do it himself.

We stuck them all over Blondie Boy's bedroom door to make it extra spooky and he took one to his Grandma's house for her bulletin board. Have you being doing any Halloween crafts?

Messy Play: Shaving Cream Painting

NotBlondeHusband has been working Sunday days so I've been trying to do something fun with Blondie Boy while he's at work. We've gone to to the park, made donut muffins and I decided to maybe try something artsy-craftsy and do some messy play painting.

I can't remember where I saw it but I saw someone do painting by mixing shaving cream and food colouring. I was a bit worried that food colouring would stain Blondie Boy's hands and my bathroom so I use washable paint  for our shaving cream paint instead. I used a muffin tin as a palette which worked really well; you won't need as much shaving cream as you think as it will expand and poof up as you mix the paint in with it.

I tend to do all painting and other messy play activities in the bathroom for easier clean-up but in this case Blondie Boy used the tub as his canvas, too. We started out with some paper but he had more fun painting the tiles which was fine with me. 

 I told him he could paint anything he wanted except his hair. Guess what he did 2.5 seconds after I said that. Not a big deal really, just meant I had to wash his hair.

He had a great time making hand-prints on the wall and writing his name (it wasn't legible but he said the correct letters so it counts) and kept telling me how much fun he was having and how the shaving cream paint felt like ketchup. The only downside was that the tub got VERY slippy the more covered in paint he got so eventually we had to end so he didn't get hurt. I think he could have spent the rest of the evening painting if he hand't been slipping and sliding all over.

Clean up was as easy as spraying down the tub so can't complain there. We'll definitely be doing this one again since it was cheap, easy and fun. Do you have a favourite easy and cheap activity you like to do with toddlers?