Witches hats and acorn treats

Do you pin?  I'm talking about Pinterest, a digital pinboard site that allows the collection of themed pictures of your choosing.  It's a total time sink, and I can spend hours there looking through the art, crafts, foods, decorating, and other images that are pinned to peoples' boards.  My boards are here, if you're interested in taking a look or, even better, following my boards.

I've had fun the last few days making Halloween treats and some fall snacks, all thanks to Pinterest.

First up: witches' hats.  The directions are found here.  If you go to the recipe, you'll see that the professional's look much better than mine.  I used cookie icing, instead of a thin frosting, to make the bows, and they got all melty.  That didn't stop the kids from eating them, though! 

Sweet witch hats.

 Next up: chocolate and peanut butter acorns.  I loved this idea, and they are cute and easy to make. Matthew helped me make them, and it was a nice way to spend time together.  Recipe is here.

Yummy!

And finally, a pin that showed gorgeous single-serve apple pies in a basket, with a link to Williams-Sonoma and their apple pocket pie mold.  Here are mine.  Jeremy absolutely loves any kind of pie, and had a ball helping me make a few of these today.  They'll fit right into a sandwich bag and he can pack them in his lunch.

Mmmm... just needs a spoonful of ice cream.

I'm also going to make the oreo cookie mummy pops again (see last year's post), over the next evening or two.  I have the correct eyes this time, so hopefully they'll look even better this year.

Halloween Fantasy Land

The boys love rich fantasy worlds.  Jeremy tends to prefer tales of magic, while Matthew prefers game-oriented shows, and their preferences are reflected in their choices of Halloween costumes:  Harry Potter for Jeremy and Dan (of the Bakugan series) for Matthew.

We had a great evening walking through the neighborhood with friends and neighbors.  It was a beautiful evening, no full moon this year but plenty of bats swooping around to give that nice, spooky feeling.

A few pix of the boys:

Got Mummies?

I do!  I found a little tutorial for making these adorable mummy pops (candy covered oreos) at How Does She and decided to give them a whirl.  I did order the eyes that were used in the tut, but they didn't arrive in time, so I substituted some small candies instead.  I found it takes 2 14-oz bags of candy melts to make 25 mummipops.

And they came out just adorable!  Here is a closeup:

And here's one of them in the spider clothesline basket I made last Halloween:

For Halloween this year, Matthew went as Dan (from Bakugan) and Jeremy as Harry Potter.  Matthew's in that "don't take my picture stage" and it's driving me nuts to try to get a decent picture of him.  But I keep telling myself that it will be good blackmail material in a few years...

We went to trunk-or-treat at the school last night, and the kids had a ball.   This is a picture of one of the witches hosting a trunk - hands down, my favorite adult costume of the night!

Potion Making

My guys love all things Harry Potter right now, whether it's the books, the video games, or just make believe play pretending to be Harry and the other characters.  Jeremy will be HP for Halloween.  And the new HP Lego sets are some of the top items on their Christmas lists.

Since they're having such fun with it, I made these potion bottles to add to our Halloween decorations.  The yellow bottle contains Petrification potion (will turn you into a stone statue), the green holds Aconitum (will turn you into a werewolf), and the purple has Time Freezing potion.  The boys love pretending to drink the potions and acting out what would happen.

Supplies: Alcohol Ink (Tim Holtz/Ranger), ColorBox Fluid Chalk,
Silhouette SD Digital Cutter, Labels from Silhouette store,
glass bottles with cork stoppers (Michael's).

Other than getting costumes and preparing for Halloween, we've been getting necessary outdoor chores (like planting pansies, pruning and garage cleaning) done while we have some gorgeous fall weather.  I guess planting pansies in October may sound quite strange to my northern readers - down here in the south, they just can't handle the summer heat.  But they do quite well through the winter, and bring a welcome burst of color on dreary gray winter days.