Another day, another dressing up opportunity!

Sometimes the idea of Halloween doesn't sit comfortably with me, I didn't use to like people we didn't know knocking on our door expecting sweets. Now the boys are a bit older they love Halloween. They get to dress up, do fun things like carve pumpkins and eat sweets. And the crafty side of me gets excited about making things and decorating the house.

We got a great deal on those pumpkins, due to Tesco's home delivery substituting, price matching and applying a further discount. So instead of 2 x medium pumpkins for £1, we got 2 x extra large pumkins for just 2p! This year Matthew was straight in pulling the inners out of the pumpkin with his hands, Callum on the other hand didn't like the feel of it so he used the tongs.

I found a free download for Boo cake toppers on the Click, Write, Scrapbook blog, which I printed and punched out using a tag punch. They made really cute labels for the cones of sweeties I had made up for the Treat or Treaters. Each little brown paper cone contained 4 halloween sweets; chocolate eye balls, chewits fangs and halloween shapes fruit gums.

I also found the great idea to decorate the front door made by cutting strips into a black bin bag and stretching them. Matthew and Callum cut and decorated the paper bats, pumpkins and ghosts you see in the third photo, their very own idea. I then sewed them together into a garland which we hung from the hall lights.

And we made Bat Cupcakes from a simple chocolate cupcake recipe, a Halloween take on the more common butterfly cakes. Those shiny eyes are silver edible balls.

The boys dressed up, Callum as Darth Vader and Matthew as a wizard with a white face, complete with blood. The lightsabers given to the boys by Laura and David at Zacks birthday party came in really handy. Callum kept his lit on red for Darth Vader and Matthew unscrewed the saber part so that the lights would illuminate his face - cool effect!

Our front door with the lit pumpkins, the door decoration and two spooky looking boys.

We hadn't planned to take the boys trick or treating as our immediate neighbours were away (those were the only houses we took them to last year). However, the kids that did venture to our front door (our little close was dimly lit) were all cute little kids, no scary masks this year and they had lots of sweets in their bags. So we threw caution to the wind and took the boys out to join in the fun, only knocking on the doors of the houses that had pumpkins outside (we didn't want to annoy anyone). The boys came back with a bag full of sweets each (seen in the first photo). So much more fun to be given sweets rather than just handing them out! I guess there'll be no getting out of it next year!

What did you do for Halloween?

(Oh and I should add that the fab halloween digital art was a freebie by Katie Pertiet at Designer Digitals, go find it here and the frame is by Katie Pertiet too)