Wonder Woman

 It was a super hero kind of Halloween this year.  When Skeeto said he wanted to be Spiderman, I decided to punt and buy him a costume.  But I was NOT going to pass up a change to make a Wonder Woman costume!  As usual, it was a collaboration with my Mom which means she does most of the hard work :)

The cape was amazing.  Now, you might be thinking....Wonder Woman didn't wear a cape.  Oh contraire!  And I think we nailed it!

 

We also opted for a skirt.  Izzypop wasn't too keen on wearing underwear to school.  But we can even call that authentic :)

Needless to say it was a SUPER Halloween!  We had such a great time.  Giant thanks to grandma for helping to pull off another great year!  Love you!

Hansen Halloween Vol 3

The Third Annual Hansen Halloween Craft Extravaganza was a success!  We had a great time together making Halloween books.  I had tried some out last year and we decided that would be our theme this year.

The kids had their own Halloween gingerbread houses to construct.

We had some amazing creativity going on.  Everyone's ended up surprisingly different.

 

Here's Ashee's.

 

And Ashley's for Ax and Max.

 

Shereen's potion book may be my favorite!

Jess had a genius idea to put one kind of tissue paper down first, the put another color over it and peel it off in certain places.  So cool.

Even Izzypop did her own.....while eating some sort of chocolate product :)

 

Mom's ended up looking really cool.  She used some really cool textured papers to wrap the bindings.

 

I wanted to add to my Harry Potter potion table, so I made this one this year.

 

It looks great with the rest of the HP goodies!

 

I had such a great time.  Thanks ladies for being the most awesome family ever!

4th Flag

First I took a leftover shelf from IKEA and painted the entire thing white.  I then put a second coat of white on the second and 4th slats.  Afterwards, I wrapped the second and fourth slats with paper to protect them from the red paint and painted the other three slats red.

 

I then painted a wooden 4, a 1/4 inch 7x7 square and a wooden star white.  The 4 and the square got a coat of blue on top of that.

 

Then I sanded all pieces and glued them together. A little jute string for a finishing touch.

Cute As A Button Valentines.

I decided to make Valentines for the Young Women this year.  I wanted something easy, cute and NOT food!

 

These button earrings did the trick.  I had some extra fabric and bought the covered button kits from amazon.  Glued some earring backs on the buttons, made a cute little card and that was it!  I'm just ticked I didn't have any left over for me!

 

 

Christmas Gifts for the Gals

I saw this craft at Wood Connection and loved it.  I bought the wood there, but made my own vinyl stencils since I was making so many.  Also made my own tags. 

I used the same paper on the back that I used on last year's countdown calendar gift to my YW leaders so they would match.

 I thought as long as I was making gifts for people, I might as well make one for myself.  This 12 days of Christmas sign has to be the easiest craft from Wood connection ever.  Paint the back black.  Glue the 12 days printout on the wood, then use texturing cream to make it look like a chalkboard.  Literally a 15 minute craft.  I put it in the kitchen to add a little Christmas spirit there.

Halloween Unconventional Challenge

I used to watch Project Runway religiously before we got rid of cable.  I loved the unconventional challenges.  The creativity always blew me away.  How could anyone make anything out of dollar store items?  And who would want to???  Well, these crazy people, that's who.  We started with anything we could find that was red from the dollar store.  Cups, dish drying racks, buckets, flashlights, anything.

 Then, in true Project Runway fashion....it was chaos for a couple days.

Glue guns, velcro, yelling, crying....complete chaos.

But I'm proud to say, we "made it work." :)

 And this little twerp couldn't be happier.  Even his sister, Merida, approved.

2nd Annual Hansen Halloween!

We had so much fun last year, that we just had to do another Hansen Halloween Craft Extravaganza!

This year, the aunts, cousins, Grandma and our newest official member, Jess, decided to try our hands at potion bottles.  We had a great time just hanging out and chatting while we worked.

We started with a bunch of empty bottles we collected from various places.  I bought a lot of really old ones off ebay for all of us to pick from.  I decided to drip hot glue from the top of a couple of mine.  Once they are painted, they look like melting wax.

Once the bottles were prepped, we spray painted them.  We had all kinds of colors: black, white, purple, metalics, etc.  Once they were painted, we added labels we mostly found off the internet combined with Halloween scrapbook paper, embellishments and corks from Hobby Lobby.

We love the final results!!!  I only got pictures of a few sets, but here they are:

First Ashley's

And Shereen's

Grandma Yo-Yo's

Even the kids got into some potion action!  Here are Axel's, Lizzy's and Saylor's.

Here are Callie's

And finally mine.  Since I'm a Harry Potter nerd, all my potions are from HP.  I have Essence of Dittany, Draught of Living Death, Acromantula Venom, Felix Felicis, Wartcap Powder, Amortentia, Veritaserium, Mandrake, and, my personal favorite, Skele-Gro.  For the Skele-Gro, I used the same hot glue technique as on the other bottles, but I added little plastic skulls and bones that I had found at Michaels.  After that, I painted the bottle off-white and dry brushed a little brown over the top to make it look old and dirty.

Mom got a jump start on us and created this amazing display for her upcoming work party.  She's going to be a creepy candy lady.

She made all her own labels, of course.  Show off!  ;)

After taking mine home, I put them in the front room with the rest of the Halloween treasures.  While we were making potion bottles, I decided to also make these books (which may have to be next year's project).  I used the tutorial I found on Pinterest here.  In the tutorial, she uses paper towel, but I used tissue paper instead and it worked great.

Here are a couple more pics of the books.  We are definitely doing this next year!