Just in time for Halloween (or, you know, any kind of occasion that calls for some spooky fun), here’s a super simple stamp project.
I carved some ghastly stamps and used them on small paper bags I’ll fill with treats for my kid’s friends for Halloween, but you could just as easily use them on cards, banners, posters, or any other kind of decoration.
Get the free halloween stamp template!
What You Need
Here’s everything you need to make Halloween treat bags (obviously, sub out the bags for an appropriate printing surface if you’re making cards or banners instead!)
Small Paper bags, 3″ wide. (The depth and height of bags this size seem to differ by manufacturer, but any bag that’s at least 3″ wide will be perfect. These would be great!)
Optional: Gel pens or other kinds of markers for embellishing after you’ve stamped
Tips
Make sure you stamp the area of the bag that will be visible once the bag is full and the top is folded over.
Keep in mind that the folds and seams of the bag will affect how the stamp applies the ink. Embrace the tiny imperfections!
Not all light-coloured inks will show up well on dark paper – be sure to read ink labels carefully, and experiment.
These stamps are cute on their own, if I do say so myself, but I love them even more when I use them as a starting point. In the photo at the top of the post, you can see how much more awesome the bags look with a little bit of gel pen and marker thrown into the mix.
Fall is the only time of year when I absolutely love cooking. Everything about making fall food makes me happy.
And fall is when we celebrate the Jewish New Year – Rosh Hashanah. As with most Jewish holidays, one of the most salient ways we celebrate is by feasting as a family.
Traditional Rosh Hashanah foods are sweet, for wishing our loved ones a sweet new year. We dip apples in honey, we eat sweet kugel, we make apple desserts.
And to mark and celebrate the cycle of the year, and of life, we eat challah that’s round instead of oblong.
Challah is a mildly sweet, braided egg bread that’s usually braided. Want to make some?
For Rosh Hashanah, here’s my favourite way to braid my loaves into a circle – it’s more like a combination of weaving and braiding.
Between the Saturday-night timing and the rain stopping around 5PM, Halloween this year was one of the best and busiest ever. We saw around 350 trick-or-treaters!
Back in August, the kid declared that for Halloween, he wanted to be Chewbacca… driving the Millennium Falcon. Then we all fell in line and were assigned or chose our own Star Wars costumes. He told me I should be Darth Vader, and that was so perfectly obvious that I was happy to go along. Greg decided the morning of Halloween to be Han Solo, then emerged a couple of hours later encased in carbonite. Such is Greg’s aversion to ever doing the expected. My parents arrived with their Yoda and Leia costumes ready to go (okay, those weren’t DIYed).
Greg worked so hard on the cardboard Millennium Falcon, and this photo is the only one I got, because Owen refused to wear it at his school parade and on Halloween proper. Kids, I tell you.
Obviously, I bought my Vader mask, but I made the rest of the costume myself. For the cape, I followed these instructions, including the hood since I figure I can use a black cape for a hundred costumes into the future. For the rest, I wore black leggings, socks and gloves. I turned a printed t-shirt inside out and made the computery part with duct tape using these photos as reference. (Google auto-generated that .gif up there, you guys.)
It’s taken me many years to get used to Halloween being a fireworks holiday, but this is how we roll here in Vancouver (across all of Canada?). Our neighbour put on a huge spectacle for half an hour!
So tell me, did you DIY your Halloween? What did you make? How much fun did you have?
As of last weekend, Owen has seen the whole original Star Wars trilogy. And he’s hooked.
So it was no surprise to me that he gave the following answer the other day when the topic of Halloween came up and I asked him if he knows yet what he wants to be: Chewbacca. Specifically, Chewbacca driving the Millennium Falcon. Good thing I asked him about this in August, because Greg and I will certainly need the time to engineer such a feat. With O’s help, of course.
The first thing I did, obviously, was take to Google to see what’s out there in kids’ Chewbacca costumes. I was not surprised to see loads of diminutive Yodas and Leias and Skywalkers, but I was surprised to see very few Chewies. Ewoks, yes. But very few Chewies.
Which was daunting, until it became exciting.
I did find some things worth noting, though. (Some are affiliate links because I’m toying with that) like:
and
and
and
and of course there’s wicked Star Wars crochet, like
and
and Greg found this, and I found this but decided not to buy it because we’re going to wing it instead, and this is just epic.
Greg will take on the cardboard engineering of the Millennium Falcon. Stay tuned!
Hi! I'm a writer and editor, and also like a camp counselor for grownups. I help people have way more fun making stuff. Learn more about how right here.
Hi! I'm a writer and editor, and also like a camp counselor for grownups. I help people have way more fun making stuff. Learn more about how 
