Fancy some ideas to make some crafts with your kids on colder, greyer days of fall? I always do seasonal activities with mine and fall is one of the best times to use colours and nature at hands. Plus if you like Halloween, but not so much orange overload, I have some ideas for you. So you will find the recipes for DIYs of what we did this year at the end of this post. It might give you some inspiration:
I love seeing all the autumn colours. It was never my favourite season because it meant the end of summer. But I don't know if it's an age thing or just changes of taste over life... I now love it as much as all seasons.When it's sunny or not raining, we usually go to the forest. The one called Foret de Soignes I talked about in one of my first posts :
leaves autumn contrast
leaves kids foret de soignes
leaves light autumn
leaves kids foret de soignes
It's the ideal time to gather leaves of different shapes and colours.You can find leaves in the parcs or in the streets if you don't have any access to wider nature. Autumn is just amazing:You can do many decorations with those leaves you gathered. you'll find plenty of ideas on Pinterest. You need to make sure your leaves won't dry and curl. If you want to use them longer than a few hours, you need to cover them so they stay put. You can use wax for instance. Or hair spray. I love to use them for table settings. But this year, we decided to make a leaf garland (recipe below)!
Another thing that is really important for us close to halloween time is pumpkin crafts. Aside from classic pumpkin carving, we also make a lot of soups. So I added a super quick recipe below too.I am not a big fan of orange and it's not easy to find white pumpkins in Brussels so we decided a few years to paint them. We had them white and light blue. With golden dots or with scary faces. Lily did a really cute owl once and Eliott a scary vampire. You might find pics of those if you scroll my instagram. This year we kept it simple. I admit that it's not an easy craft with smaller kids if you don't want your house to be covered in glitter. But with a plate and bigger glitter bits, you might limit the mess.
White Pumpkin with glitter
White washable paint
Big glitter bits (stars, hearts...)
Glitter paint (optional)
Paint the top of the pumpkins. Let it dry. Then paint the bottom. And let it dry some more. You often need to do this operation twice. Start the second layer but the bottom. Let it dry and then start the second layer. Before it has dried, cover with glitter and then let it dry for good.If you want to play with them, you have to cover with wax or hair spray. We used a bit of glitter paint. If you don't want to do the glitter, you let the second white layer dry and then paint over with gold paint or any other colours. You can do patterns or you can paint faces. So many possibilities!
Garland leaves
Leaves of all sorts (I chose to mix red tones ones)
glitter paint or wax or hair spray
transparent plastic thread and a needle
glitter (if you haven't used glitter paint)
Gather all the leaves you wish to place on your garland. I love the red tones so that's how we did it this year. If you use wax or hair spray, do it straight away but if you use glitter paint, I advise to press the leaves first. Put them all under books and leave for the night. Then paint them with glitter transparent paint. Wait until it dries and press again for a few hours.Once it's dried and well flattened, put the plastic transparent thread in your needle and pass it delicately on the top of the leaves and try to have a wide enough stitching mark depending on the size of the leaf (see photos above). It will hold better that way. Then put it up on your wall. I used masking tape but anything works.
Pumpkin soup
A peeled and cut in squares pumpkin or butternut squash, one onion or two shallots, some broth powder. Water over 2/3rd of it and cooked until soft. Mix and add coconut milk to taste (from 100ml to 400ml). Delicious!
What do you like to do as autumn crafts?While you think, here is a lot of outtakes of our latest autumn walks:
leaves water foret de soignes
And some flowers for you to wish you a nice day:
