Making a pumpkin lantern...

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!! 

To make your pumpkin lantern...

You will need: 

• an adult
• somewhere that doesn't matter if it gets sticky (an old table outside?)/a newspaper
• a sharp knife
• a pumpkin
• a spoon 
• a tea light

Get your friendly adult to slice the lid off the pumpkin and then
you can use the spoon to scrape away the seeds.
If you dry the seeds you can use them for a necklace.

Scrape the seeds out of the pumpkin too.

Draw a picture of the face you want on the front.

Draw the face on the pumpkin and get your pet adult to cut it out -
unless you're old enough to do it yourself with an adult beside you.

It can be fiddly.

Make sure you slice the pumpkin flesh away right through
or the candle light won't show up. 

Finally, Jake cut little triangles out around the lid on the little pumpkin.
We've heard that if you rub salt on the  inside they last longer.
But not if they're left out in the rain.

Ooohhhhhhhh! Happy Halloween!!!!

We've heard Americans are much better at this than we are and have lots of special tools and templates they can buy in stores. Well done you guys! But we had fun anyway.

Drama in our little garden...

As the gale hit and we hurried back from shopping to find our neighbour's trampoline
had flipped right over the hedge like a giant pancake and landed upside down in our garden! Balls everywhere!

Our clever neighbour saw that the roots on our apple tree were lifting 3-4 cm out of the ground at times! 

So Christina sat on the trampoline and held on hard and called reinforcements, Jakob grabbed a
saw and started giving the tree a short back and sides to reduce the wind resistance - and I shut Watson out of the way and took pictures.

While the wind roared, it got dark and the neighbours hurried to dismantle
the trampoline before it took off again...

...Jakob continued lopping off branches and trying to make sure
they didn't land on the neighbours' heads.

And this morning, though there's not much of the tree, it has survived and
 from experience we know it will be shooting up like crazy next year :o).

Several hours later, Watson and I have been cutting up the branches ready for recycling in our stove.
While out for a walk, Watson found another stray plastic ball that had flown right to
the other side of our housing estate. Well done Watson! 

Pumpkins?

We had planned to make a pumpkin last night but events rather overtook us. Don't worry. That post will be along soon :o)

Conjure up your own Frankenstein...

Our dog Dr Watson is all ready for Halloween, though there's still
almost a week to go until 31st Oct. He's a real party animal.

How to make a monster:

Feed your child a lot of chocolate, fizzy drinks and let them stay up way too late. Just joking. 

The kind of monster we once made went down a treat with kids of about 8 or 9. 

Step 1: While the kids are on a treasure hunt finding red toffee apple vampire hearts and driving kebab sticks trhough them, find a room and put four tables in a square leaving a gap in the middle big enough for a person.

Step 2: Cover the tables with table cloths (crushed velour in red/orange or black from Jysk Sengetøj) that reach the ground but leave a gap in the middle over the hole.

Step 3: Cover the hole with another smaller table cloth.

Step 4: Fill a sack with body parts - a cauliflower for a brain, heart, wig, gloves that look like a hands, shoes, old pair of mens underpants, bra? etc. etc.

Step 5: Hide a daddy under the table wearing some of the same stuff

Step 6: Turn down the lights and invite in the kids in to sit on chairs around the outside of the tables. Parents round the walls 

Step 7: Explain you're going to make a monster because Halloween isn't cool without a monster

Step 8. Take the sack of body parts slowly round the table getting kids to fish stuff out one by one and carefully peeling back just the relevant corner of the top tablecloth (brain at top end, feet at bottom) and tuck the body parts underneath the cloth out of sight. You'll still see a lumps.

Step 9:  When done, get the kids to hold hands and chant Aberacadabera. Then louder. Then really loud.

Step 10: Up through the hole in the tables, draped in the top tablecloth rises your very own monster and as the tablecloth slips off you see he's wearing a bra, underpants and all kinds of other body parts/makeup - this time not a mummy but a willing Daddy - preferably the tallest of the lot.

I accept no liability for telling you this trick. But it really worked. The parents were as goggle-eyed as the kids :o) 

Photo by Thomass Hanhan
Here's a dear smiley spider from the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen. We'll be showing you more of his friends in a week or two - that exhibition is on until December. And we'll be showing you the mummies on show at Glyptoteket all year round.

But first....there's only two days left of the Halloween exhibition in Tivoli so check out the other post quick!

Tivoli...the dark side

But great fun for all ages, really though the Scary otel opens at 17:00 and is for kids aged 12 or over. But it all shut down on 27 Oct ready for Christmas preparations so don't miss it.

Lots of props for a party of your own back home.

Cuddly spiders everywhere.

A choice of sticky tricky sweets and drinks. But mind you don't get legless
 in front of the kids - like this skellybones (as my Grandad used to call them).

Looking slightly peaky after a ride on the octopus?

Monster pumpkins.

19,000 pumpkins altogether.

And plenty of scary stuff hidden in flower beds.

A whole house

And a 'make your own pumpkin lantern' stall.

Here are some that were on show. Great fun.

If you haven't made one yet, watch out for our DIY post
showing how we made our lanterns. It'll be along in a couple of days:o)

Been a bit busy...

 It's been a bit of a busy summer...as you can see.

This is why our blog has been a bit quiet over the past couple of months. First we had a blessing in England and celebrated my mum's 85th birthday too.

Then we had a civil ceremony with the Danish side of the family. Yes, I'm now officially granny to Jakob's darling granddaughter Laura though I've considered myself granny all along :o). Jakob's girls are not Facebook fans so I'm respecting their privacy by not including them here. You'll have to wait until Kathrine is a famous journalist and Julie's singing talents get her in the headlines.

She's so cute.

And Jakob can  smile - now it's all over.

Groom and best man

Don't worry. No animals were harmed in the filming of this occasion though
the lacing on my wedding dress was so tight it probably caused permanent damage :o)

Figaphobics make a kite...i.e. what not to do.

I will start by saying find the website below and follow the instructions a LOT more carefully than we did. 

 http://www.my-best-kite.com/how-to-make-a-sled-kite.html

This is what we rustled up from our junk trunk...skinny tape that was too skinny so we had to go and find the wide tape. Scissors, a plastic bag and some doublesided door draught excluder tape that fell off the door anyway and turned out to be pretty useless for kites too. So you can save yourself the bother of buying any :o). 

These are the proper dimensions. But I have to admit to being a figaphobic, so we kind of winged it.

If you really look hard at this plastic bag you'll find the blue felt tip that is very hard to see.

We cut out the basic pattern... 

...that shows up a lot better on the website
 http://www.my-best-kite.com/how-to-make-a-sled-kite.html

Jake cut out the little vents.

Both of them.

This is where we put the insulation tape at the ends of the two sticks we
knicked from the garden.
The plants they were holding up had died anyway.

See at this point we were really happy to have found something to use the draught excluder for.
Until it started peeling off and we had to tape it down anyway.

That's me holding the tape.

Our sticks were a little short...

...but we hope you won't notice.

This was where we used wide tape to reinforce the pointy side bits where the string should be attached. 

We had this old Duty Free bag and as we thought our kite looked boring, we taped it on. That meant it all got a bit top heavy but our kite is only a figaphobics prototype not a proper one with all the right measurements like yours.

We didn't have string either but we did have an old retractable lead of Watson's that was quite long and didn't retract any more. So we cut off the end and used that. Watson got all excited and thought he was going for a walk, so we had to take him and that took a while. 

But finally we had something that looked a lot more like a kite than Stanley the Stork. ..but is about as effective.
Of course, because we hadn't followed the measurements correctly,
we're still waiting for a big enough gale to get it off the ground.

Hope you have better luck :o)