Witches' Brew

My Halloween display is done!

I've had this idea "brewing" for awhile (ha!) but it wasn't until recently that I figured out how to pull it together. Once I realized puffy paint would be the prefect brew, it took off from there. I had the kids paint with puffy paint (shaving cream mixed with Elmer's glue, with food coloring added in) on a half sheet of white paper. I drew an oval on the paper first, but that wasn't really necessary.

The kids picked one color (purple, orange or green) and filled in the oval. I told them to put it on really thick and not spread it around too much. Then they added glitter that matched.

The glitter was in little shakers that only let out a tiny amount at a time, which was exactly what we needed. We only wanted to add a little bit of sparkle. The puffy paint ended up drying darker, which I loved. I cut them out to resemble liquid bubbling up and over a pot, and then glued each one to the top of a cauldron. The kids added two black circles to the bottom of the cauldron for legs.

I'm not gonna lie to you. Cutting out puffy paint was a little tricky. Sometimes the puffy parts would pop so I had to be careful. And then gluing it to the pot was also difficult because I couldn't push down or I would leave fingerprints. I ended up using very little glue and just put tape on the back to hold it in place. I asked each child separately (so I would have no copy cats) what is in their brew and typed it up and stuck it to the front of the pot. Then I displayed them in the hallway with a bunch of circles for bubbles. I also decided to display our witch legs above the cauldrons. We make these every year (find out how here!), but this year we made a much smaller version. Still totally cute, though!

What were some of our ingredients, you might ask?

A lot of animal body parts, like frog legs and tips of claws and heads of snakes. And we had some creepy crawlies, like spiders and bugs. We also had eyeballs ("from a person") and rotten eggs and poison ivy. Oh, and butter! Can't forget the butter! Butter makes everything taste better!