Make Monday: Pumpkins

Orange everywhere! Our wall is covered with pumpkins to celebrate the Fall season. And making these pumpkins made for a good Fall activity on a cold, rainy day.

My neighbor expanded on our coffee filter flowers. Her son wanted to do a craft with eye droppers. So instead of using washable markers for color, they came up with the idea of using droppers with colored water.

To get started, recycle and save your infant medicine droppers. Add food coloring to various cups of water to get desired colors. Squeeze droplets onto the coffee filters watching the color diffuse together. Dry between paper towels or on paper bags. Once dry, add black construction paper faces or connect pumpkins with green vines and leaves for your own personal pumpkin patch.

Decorate your own house with pumpkins.

Make Monday: Create Paper Bag Pumpkins

It is pumpkin season and what better way to celebrate than make pumpkins to decorate your house for the season. So if you have a cold, rainy day stuck indoors that is keeping you from visiting the pumpkin patch or apple orchard, then get out your paints for some pumpkin fun. Judah and I created these brown paper bag pumpkins to add some decorations for around the house while at the same time enjoying season.

Supplies
Brown paper lunch bags
Orange, red, yellow, and green washable, finger paints
Green ribbon
Tissue paper or newspaper
Scissors
Clothespins or tape to hang bags
Glue

Instructions
Open your brown paper lunch bags to make the lunch sack flat including the sides of the bag. Using and mixing orange, red, and yellow paints, finger paint designs across the bottom 3/4 of the bag of the side that is flat. On the remaining space at the top, use green paint to cover the portion of the bag. Hang to dry with tape or clothespins. Do as many bags as you want.

The next day or once the paint is dry, you may open the bag up and fill with waded pieces of leftover tissue paper or newspaper. When the bag is full up to the top of the orange color, close shut and tie with a green ribbon to resemble the stem. Decorate as you desire.

Variations
For a more complete pumpkin look, paint the other side of the bag by adjusting the sides flat again once the first side is dry. You may otherwise glue orange tissue paper pieces to the outside of the bag instead of paint. To decorate faces, cut out eyes and mouth from black construction paper and glue to bag after painted. You may choose to use facial features found and cut from a leftover magazine for some weird, funny, or scary faces. Substitute filling the bag with candy and give to a special friend as a Halloween gift.



Lessons learned
Judah had fun with this activity as it was very simple for him to do. He enjoyed using his finger paints. We then hung up the bags with tape but when we took them down the tape ripped the bag a small amount.

Make Monday: Bubble Wrap Painted Pumpkin!

Today's craft is a bubble wrap painted pumpkin. As always, we had a lot of fun making this project and it decorates the house nicely for the season.

Supplies

Orange, Yellow, and Red Finger Washable Finger Paints
Scissors
Kitchen mixing bowl
White card stock paper
Pencil or marker
Bubble wrap used found in packaging
Black felt fabric
Green or brown construction paper
Glue

Instructions

To prepare for the project, I first used a medium sized kitchen bowl to turn upside down to trace the circle. Using scissors, I cut out the white card stock circle. Meanwhile, I took a large piece of bubble wrap, added a mixture of orange, red, and yellow finger paints onto the side of the bubbles. I laid the white circle down onto the paint and then folded the bubble wrap in half. Judah then walked and hit the bubble wrap to move the paint around onto the paper. We then removed the paper and hung to dry. We made several circles at one time while the paint was out.

The next day once the orange circles were dry, we finished our project. Mommy cut out some mouth and eye shapes from the black felt and helped Judah glue them onto the circle. We then cut and glued on green stems for the top of the pumpkins. Our finished project hangs on the dining room wall as a nice display.

Lessons Learned

Judah really enjoyed playing with the bubble wrap and finger paints. We did spread out our project on the tile kitchen floor to minimize mess. Judah also found tracing the kitchen bowl an interesting technique as we talked about shapes in things. While cutting can be for older kids, Judah helped glue on the jack-o-lantern mouth and eyes.