little spooks

I love this group shot of all the little friends - their little dead-like faces topped it off! 

Oh I'm only more than two weeks late. Nothing unusual there, though really! Anyway, the kids had a ball on Halloween. I get into this holiday (?) more and more every year - sucker! I guess it's the whole dress up thing. I love dressing the kids up. So fun - and aside from book week, when else do they get to do it?

 The house was super-simple as usual - black cardboard goes a l.o.n.g way on Halloween. A cat and some bats (and a witch in the window - but she didn't photograph very well). I strung up one of those $2 cobwebs and threw a bunch of plastic bugs all over the porch - funnily enough, the kids collected the bugs as well as their lolly bags! I also made a witch's broom out of dead reeds and a stick from the waterfront. The bigger kids loved coming home to a witch's house after school/preschool.

 My little spooks - Immy looks like she is posing as one of Charlie's Angels, minus a gun. Ha!

So this year, we had some trick or treating with some fave friends and then back to an old neighbour's house for a party. Zak was Batman (and actually kept his costume on this time, unlike last year where he refused to get out of the car at the party with his homemade spider suit on) which was pretty simple - he already had the mask so I just made a cape from black satin, stapled a spraypainted bat symbol (on cardboard) onto a satin belt and made a super-quick bat symbol throwing thingy-me-bob (Steve told me it's a batarang) from cardboard and spraypaint. Spraypaint features in everything I do...

  

Layla was a bat - shimmery black fabric cut into wings and stitched onto the shoulders of a black ballet wrap-around with a finger loop on each wing. I also made her a headpiece with ears that much to Layla's horror flopped and didn't stick upright. I gave her some glam eye make-up and she was happy....

And Immy was a skeleton. She originally wanted to go as a sheep. I don't know where that came from. But then after I made some spookier suggestions (I don't quite get the anything-goes dress up thing Americans do), she chose the skeleton. And I'm glad she did - she was so cute. I cut out some bones out of white sticky-backed felt and stuck them to a black long-sleeved tee and black leggings. A 3-second face paint job on our way to the car completed the look.

In this house, we're in the vicinity of where we trick-or-treat so Steve met us on the front porch with spooky hands filled with lollies for the kids (plastic gloves). Strangers got to grab from a bowl of skeleton lollipops and orange-tongue Wizz Fizz. As it turned out, we only had a couple other trick-or-treaters. I guess we were pretty much it! And for the party, I made some chocolate owl and spider cupcakes. Thanks Pinterest for the Pinspiration...

And that's a wrap for another year.

{Images by Belinda Graham for The Happy Home}