One of my favorite snack foods has got to be the pretzel. It’s crunchy and salty, it’s tasty on its own, and it pairs well with both sweet and savory ingredients. You can dip it in chocolate or cheese and both will be delicious (just not at the same time… unless you’re really adventurous).

 

Sometimes it’s fun to pick a favorite snack and then create variations on a theme with it. Here are a few different ideas for bringing Halloween flair to some yummy pretzel treats.

 

These pumpkin pretzels from Make Bake Celebrate are too cute for words! Chocolate-covered and dipped in sprinkles, they’re the perfect salty-sweet combination. Add leaves and stems with some piped chocolate for added detail.

 

Photo via Make Bake Celebrate

 

 

You can never have enough chocolate covered pretzels! For a fun variation on the same flavors, you must try these Frankenstein pretzels! Grab pretzel rods, green melting chocolate, black gel icing, chocolate kisses, and shredded coconut. With some simple assembly, you can make the perfect creepy cuties to compliment your bright pumpkin pretzels.

 

Photo via Simply Designing with Ashley

 

Finally, let’s finish up with a savory pretzel dish. With some pretzel sticks, string cheese, and chives for garnish, you can create the most adorable witches’ brooms. Cut up the string cheese to act as bristles, stick in a pretzel to be the handle, and tie on a chive if you like (you can skip this last part if you’re not a chive fan).

 

Photo via

 

Yum! These make perfect Halloween treats, but are also great festive snacks for any time—be it in the classroom, after school, or for a sleepover.

 

Which of these variations is your favorite? Do you have any other spooky snack ideas?

Pumpkin decorating doesn’t have to be dangerous or super messy (think knives, pumpkin guts, spray paint, etc). You can create unique, vibrant pumpkins with a few simple materials and some creativity.

 

When it comes to pumpkins and crayons, Alexa of The Swell Life really nailed it with two great decorating DIYs. Fun and colorful, both projects feature white pumpkins and a box of crayons. No carving necessary!

 

First off, how could we resist this DIY called the “Crayon Scribble Pumpkin”? All you’ll need to create your own are bright crayons and a white pumpkin (white displays color so much better)! This is perfect for kids of any age since there are no sharp tools or mess involved. Just grab your pumpkin and start coloring! Create a random colorful design, draw a face or picture, or work on an interesting pattern—there’s no limit to what you can do!

 

 

Photo via The Swell Life

 

For a fun twist with the same tools, grab some glue and a hairdryer for this next version. Take your crayons and this time, remove the wrappers and break them in half (you won’t need a whole crayon for this). Glue them around the top of your pumpkin (again, white shows the colors better) and apply heat with a hairdryer set on high. There could be some crayon runoff, so you’ll want to lay down a garbage bag or tarp under your pumpkin.

 

 

Photo via The Swell Life

 

You can customize your color palette—try orange and yellow for a candy corn theme, or purple and black for Halloween. For a really creepy version, try melting all red crayons—it’ll look amazing and dramatic for a haunted porch.

 

And that’s it! Two main materials, two great projects. Don’t forget to check out The Swell Life for tons more great pumpkin decorating projects. What fun ways do you like to decorate pumpkins? How would you customize these versions with crayons?

It’s just not Halloween until there are some sweet treats around! Save the wrapped candy for trick-or-treaters and add a little homemade flair for October festivities.

 

These spooky sweet treats are sure to be a hit!  All featuring marshmallows, they’re easy to make and more cute than creepy. With a few bags of marshmallows and some other simple ingredients, you can create your own rice krispies jack-o-lantern, chocolate and marshmallow witch, and marshmallow ghost.

 

These fun snacks provide the perfect balance of spooky and sweet—they’re festive without being scary—great for younger kids. Plus, since they mostly just require assembly, little ones can help you in the kitchen. They make perfect classroom snacks, Halloween party favors, or just festive desserts. For specific ingredient lists and directions, check out the source links.

 

 

Use the marshmallow as a binder for these deliciously sweet pumpkin rice krispies treats.

 Photo via Food Family Finds

 

 

No baking or cooking required! Just gather ingredients and assemble these spooktacular witches.

 

Photo via Taste of Home

 

Keep things extra simple with these creepy-cute ghosts. All you need are marshmallows and an edible food pen (consider gel icing as a substitute).

 

Photo via Cook Play Explore

 

What are your favorite Halloween treats to make?

If you have younger kiddos, you know that Halloween is super fun, but can also mean tempering some of the extra scary stuff. Well, kooky meets spooky with these adorable tissue box monsters! If you want a great Halloween craft for some little ones that’s festive without being frightening, this is the one for you.

 

 

Photo via A Girl and a Glue Gun

You’ll need empty tissue boxes (one per monster), but after that the decorations are up to you! A good decorating base is: some paper (construction, wrapping, computer, any will do), paint, glue, and scissors. For the creatures’ eyes, you can use cut up egg cartons, pom poms, paper, or googly eyes. Feel free to throw some glitter, stickers, feathers, markers, or pipe cleaners in the mix—whatever you have on hand will do.

Photo via Spoonful

Once you have all your materials set up… assemble! The box’s opening (once for tissues) should serve as the monster’s mouth, but how you align it is your call. Start by decorating the box, which serves as the creature’s base. If it needs to dry once it is complete, let it do so before adding eyes, arms, and legs.

Photo via Danielle’s Place

Explore colors, patterns, and shapes—they all add to your monster’s personality. Make it friendly! Or angry!  Be as creative or outrageous as you like. See if you can add fun details like hair, eyebrows or lashes, a tongue, moles, and teeth.

 

Once these crazy guys and gals are all finished and dry, you can play with them or add them to your Halloween display (or both!). Just Boo-ti-ful!

Now that October has arrived, Halloween is on the horizon. That means costume planning, spooky decorations, and of course… candy and treats! Since it’s only the beginning of the month, one way to slowly start gearing up for the holiday is to incorporate things that work for both fall and Halloween.

 

The perfect solution: a little candy corn décor! This quick and easy craft is perfect for setting the tone for October… plus it has pretty fall colors! Bonus: it’s simple and safe enough for kids to work on, as well.

 

 

Photo via Danielle, My Life as I Pin It

 

You’ll need yarn (white, yellow, and orange), scissors, glue, and a foam cone (in a pinch, you can create your own cone with some poster board and tape).

 

Start at the bottom with your yellow yarn. Glue the end to the foam (you may also be able to just tuck it in the back… depends on your cone) and start wrapping! Once you’ve gotten about a third of the way up, cut the yarn and glue or tuck in the end. Next up: orange! Repeat the process with your orange yarn, and finally finish up with white to the top. Tada!

 

 

Photo via Sarah, Thrifty Décor Chick

 

These candy cuties add some festive fun to any room without going too overtly “Halloween” too soon. But as the month goes on… look out! More delightfully spooky projects to come.

Thanksgiving was great this year (as always)!  Loads of family, friends, food, laughter and then double gobble more of it!  The next day my family and I all went for a stroll through the park to digest our feast and we found all these fallen leaves on the ground.  I thought the branches would’ve been bare by now, but no, not yet!  We got lucky.  The fallen leaves looked like feathers to me so we had an idea to make them into Turkeys!

We glued on some googley eyes to make them extra silly, but I’m sure you can come up with something just as good without them. Oh, maybe a nut fallen from the tree?  What do you think?

I know Halloween just passed, but since I was on this kick of transforming fallen objects into artwork when I saw the stick I thought of a broom.  Put a flying lady on it and you have a witch!  What do you think a stick could turn into?  Anything is possible!  Please share with Scribble Blog your fallen object creations.

Thank you Thanksgiving for the fun, family, and more crafty ideas : )  Gobble.

Happy Halloween, everybody! What are you being this year? After all the build up, the day is finally here. Unfortunately, I think Frankenstorm (appropriately named for the holiday, no?) has overshadowed the fun of Halloween.

Lots of people are still without power, many are dealing with damage to their homes, and Halloween has had to take a bit of a backseat. That okay, though. Just because Hurricane Sandy has decided to crash our Halloween party, doesn’t mean we can’t still have a spooktacular day!

If your plans have been canceled, your transportation is shut down, or your neighborhood has seen too much damage to host trick-or-treating, here are some ideas for a safe and celebratory Halloween day.

 

- Storm damage is pretty scary in itself! If you’re somewhere you can pitch in with the cleanup, take a little time today to help out.

 

- Park it on the couch and have a scary movie marathon, complete with candy treats.

 

- Try out some of our awesome and spooky crafts here and on the Scribble Shop Blog.

 

- Already have your costumes, but can’t really go out trick-or-treating? Have a family costume party wherever you are!

 

- Didn’t have time to put together your costumes with all the hurricane hoopla? Challenge your family to a makeshift costume contest with items found around the house.

 

- Create Halloween cards for friends and loved ones to brighten their somewhat gloomy week.

 

- If you’re still without power, use the darkness for some Halloween fun. Grab the flashlights and candles and make up some ghost stories to tell! Even if you have electricity, just turn your lights off for scary story time.

 

And if you’re able to carry on with your regularly scheduled Halloween programming, go for it! Do you have any ideas for some last-minute indoor holiday fun? Let us know! Have a safe and fun day!

If Halloween had an official animal mascot, I think it’d have to be the spider. Okay, also maybe the black cat, but we’re going to focus on spiders for now. We’ve had a few crafts this month spotlighting the spider and I think this one is a pretty perfect combination of creepy and clever.

If you’re looking to showcase some festive and unique décor in honor of Halloween (and a creative scribbler like you might as well!), then it is time to check out these spider web balloons!

You’ll need clear latex balloons, small rubber spiders, a product called Hi-Float to help create the spider webs, and air or helium. The project isn’t time consuming at all, but you will need two days so the Hi-Float can dry overnight. Check out this tutorial at Crafty Crafty for directions.

 Photo: Crafty Crafty

Halloween is such a perfect time to flex those creative crafting muscles. Between costumes, decorations, and treats… there’s no limit to how many spooky, delightful, funny, or tasty homemade creations you can come up with.

Have you already started decorating? Do you have any spooktacular crafts to share? We’d love to hear how you’re gearing up for the fun day.

Are you having a Halloween party this year? Since my birthday is a week before Halloween, fun décor and party favors always catch my eye. While I haven’t mixed the holiday with my birthday celebrations in recent years, I have plenty of fun memories from my childhood spooky theme parties.

Obviously, tasty treats, candy or otherwise, have to be included in the festivities. A great substitute or addition to any basic goodie bag is this clever candy hand! You can get creative and fill them with whatever you like, but here are some cute ideas.

They key is to fill out the hand form, especially the fingers, like in the two examples below. One uses rolls of Smarties for the fingers and the other uses candy corn as fingernails. Both are adorable and work to pronounce the digits! Now on to the palm… you could certainly just stuff it with an assortment of candy… that’s what Halloween’s all about, no? You could also fill it with popcorn if you want to lighten up on the sugar. Tie it off with some ribbon… or a bandage if you want! And try accessorizing with a fun spider ring to finish off the look.

Photo: Preschool Alphabet

 Photo: Pinterest User

 What creative snacks do you whip up for Halloween? Maybe some spider pops? Are you looking forward to trying any new treats this year?

So it’s the middle of October! Are we preparing for Halloween yet? These creepy crawly spider lollipops from House of Baby Piranha are a perfect treat for the spooky day! They could be great favors or snacks at a Halloween party… or even an extra-special treat for trick-or-treaters.

All you’ll need are your favorite lollipops, black pipe cleaners, googly eyes, and glue. Just twist a pipe cleaner tightly around the base of the lollipop stick (make sure each side is even) and repeat this three more times so you have four pipe cleaners making eight legs. Bend the ends of each spider leg to finish the look. Then glue on two eyes and you’re all done!

Photo: House of Baby Piranha

 Do you have any fun Halloween treats that are both spookily festive and tasty? Any plans to make the most of the holiday that combines all things creepy and candy?