Pinspiring Friday (Halloween edition)

   Pinterest has been a great source this fall for Halloween craft ideas and recipes. Tim and I had a really fun day today working on several craft projects that I discovered on Pinterest. I've never really been much of a crafty person, but a lot of the ideas on the website are fairly simple and I'm really happy with the results. We created three craft projects and I also made a recipe. 
     Today we worked on carving/decorating our pumpkins for Halloween. The first craft we did was a Martha Stewart project called Drac-o-lanterns. The craft involves carving a mouth hole in a small pumpkin and then fitting it with plastic vampire teeth. 

    We had a really good time making these and they turned out so cute. We used orange pumpkins instead of the white gourds used in the example. And instead of red map tacks, I used black stick pins from my sewing kit because they stand out better. Mine is on the left and Tim's is on the right. 

Little pumpkins, big teeth.

The little guys look so cute decorating our front porch railing.

If they weren't so cute, these pumpkins would be very scary.

     The next pumpkin craft we did was to paint candy-corn pumpkins. We used painter's tape to separate each of our pumpkins into thirds and spray-painted the bottom third yellow and the top third white, leaving the middle third orange. They look really cute, but not as pretty as the ones in the original picture. 

     Tim was nice enough to help me a lot with this one. He did most of the painting and then helped scrape off the excess from where the paint dripped underneath the painter's tape. It was a really simple craft, but they look great.

Here's my very helpful husband spray-painting the pumpkins.

Here's the final product!

     The final art project of the day involved Owen. I found a craft idea on Pinterest where a woman painted her daughter's feet white and placed them on a black canvas upside down to look like ghosts. Then she labeled it with the words "Happy Halloween" and hung it with an orange ribbon. 

     I thought it looked like a really cute idea and one that we could decorate with every year as a way of remembering how little Owen's feet used to be. It was a really fun project to do and not a very hard one. Owen did really well with us painting his foot, though he is very ticklish. To make the artwork, I bought a plain canvas at Michael's and painted it black. Then we dipped Owen's right foot in white paint and used it to place three "ghosts" on the canvas. Then I used gold glitter alphabet stickers to spell out "Happy Halloween!"

This was the best picture I could get before Owen tried to eat it.

     One of the best recipes I've found on Pinterest so far is one for Caramel-Stuffed Apple Cider Cookies. I made them for the first time last week with my cousin Johanna. We made about two dozen cookies and our family ate the majority of them in one night. 

     Tim and I are going to a party tomorrow to watch the Georgia-Florida game so I decided to make the cookies again to take with us. They are flavored with Alpine brand powdered apple cider mix and stuffed with Kraft caramels. Fresh out of the oven, the caramel is warm and gooey and the cookies taste just like a caramel apple. 

These are the first batch of cookies that I made. So good!