Fall Crafts

I said I'd go back and add crafts to the themed posts, but instead I just decided to go ahead and make them their own post.  All of the ones shown are what's been salvaged from years past.  I still have yet to make what we're doing this year, so there may be another post coming up.

Apples.  This one was truly pulled out of thin air.  In the past, we'd done things like a wreath made of paper apple cut-outs, but I wanted something different.  I know the kids don't care, and I have different ones from year to year, but still. So I found this or came up with it at the last minute. We pre-cut the holes in the plates as well as cut out the leaves.  All the kids had to do was glue on the tissue paper to color the apple and glue on the leaves.

Owls. In NO WAY do I ever expect anyone else to be able to do this craft during a regular week, but we had the stuff sitting around, so we did.  I had all these pairs of kids sunglasses from something the department was going to do years ago. So popped out the lenses and then hot-glued cardstock in the shape of these giant owl eyebrows onto the top of the frames. The kids glued feathers onto the cardstock, and voila! Owl glasses. I love them, and my adult friends all wanted a pair. 

Pumpkins. Since we try to avoid Halloween and jack o'lanterns with this week, it's a little hard to do crafts with it sometimes. I love doing mosaics, so we've done that a couple years, giving them split peas, barley, and of course pumpkin seeds to use. A LOT of the pumpkin seeds never make it to the paper. Heck, a lot of the pumpkin seeds never make it to the kids. I have to buy an extra pack just for me to eat.

Halloween!  As stated before, I LOVE Halloween! So I'm giving you a two-fer.  First, the ghost.  I think it's pretty straightforward, but if you need directions, you can find them here. We simplified them a bit because we didn't want to cut out as many things, so the eyes aren't layered.

Cotton Swab Skeleton.  Again, to me this looks very self-explanatory.  If you'd like a guide to help you, click here. We did this with our elementary school kids because we felt it was a bit more difficult than the ghost.

Thanksgiving! Luckily, we have die-cuts to help us with this feat! :D A couple of years we've done a banner made of paper turkeys and fall leaves, and the kids wrote things they were thankful for on each.  Last year we decided to make a turkey hat.  Easy with our cut-outs. If you don't have one, ask around. We let people use ours as long as they bring their own paper.

HALLOWEEN DECORATIONS!!!

Last year we decided to switch up our decorations a bit. We used to have these giant Martha Stewart fans hanging in our picture book section. (See below) In junior fiction, we had gigantic spiders and spiderwebs everywhere, and in young adult we had huge scary bat wall clings. So we decided to make everything a bit nicer and prettier and not so scary. (Though I love the scary, trust me)

In our YA area, I decided to do a Dia de los Muertos banner.  I made all these little skull cut-outs, and then my coworker and I had a blast decorating them!

For the picture book section, I found a couple of banner tutorials to try out. The "Happy Halloween" banner I did based on this tutorial I found about using coffee filters. The one in the back (which is hard to see, I know) is mainly using our cutouts of a cat, owl, and jack o'lantern against different backgrounds.  If you want a tutorial, I found one here, but that person gets REALLY in-depth on the process.  I think I may have used it just for the measurements.

Finally, in our junior fiction section, we decided to keep it simple and just went with a ton of hanging bats.  Also - some bats taped to the windows for depth of field or something.  Who is it by?  Martha Stewart, of course.  Though if you look at the bats on her page, and the ones on ours, you can see a noticeable size difference.  I don't know why you'd want them as big as she has them.

Hope you enjoy and maybe use some!  I plan on posting more crafts soon!