Jack-o-Lanterns

Today we started decorating our room for Halloween. We made jack-o-lanterns, like a chinese lantern craft. I actually bought a kit from Oriental Trading because they had paper with orange on one side and yellow on the other, and they had all the face pieces on sticky foam. It only came with the orange paper and foam pieces, but I also added some of my own things. I forgot to take a picture of the kids making them, so I just have pictures of the steps. If you are making your own, you want to fold your paper in half the long way and cut slits along the fold, leaving about one inch of un-cut paper at the edge.

Even if you bought the kit, you still want to make the crease down the middle of the paper so it sticks out the right way. Then open the paper back up.

Use a glue stick to apply glue to the top inch of the paper and add a green strip of paper.

Then staple it into a cylinder shape. Use a glue stick to add the face pieces (or in our case, just peel the backing off the self-adhesive foam pieces).

And then I had the kids wrap a green pipe cleaner around their finger to make a vine.

I attached that with a stapler.

I also added yellow yarn for a handle so the kids could hold it like a real lantern, but for now they are hanging from our ceiling.

Can't wait to make more decorations!