Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper

After an excitement-filled morning watching Sydney repeatedly hang----and then drop to her doom----over and over and OVER again, in the afternoon we chilled down in the playroom.

The girls busied themselves industriously----if by industrious you mean that they tore up a bunch of my scrapbook paper and then drew on it and then taped it to the wall with the carpet tape that Matt was supposed to use to tape down the flooring four MONTHS ago and then fought over the same square inch of a six-foot-long roll of butcher paper.

The girls wanted me to hang with them, so instead of washing dishes or folding laundry or blogging for bucks I took some scrapbook paper and the Halloween Papel Picado paper bunting templates (a free download from The Toymaker )and created this: I didn't realize how much I would love these paper buntings until I started making them. I mean, seriously, look how awesome:

I like how the scrapbook paper doesn't necessarily match the overt theme, and since Will now wants another bunting just for her room, I think I'm going to try making a couple of more buntings from recycled materials--magazines, old book pages, newspaper, etc.

The downloadable templates for this bunting also include a cat and an owl, but I thought I might save those for a different activity. In upcoming years it would certainly be interesting to explore the Papel Picado with the girls as well as other aspects of the Day of the Dead, but for this year we're mostly exploring Halloween as a celebration of autumn. Why, then, you may ask, did I put skulls in our bunting?

Well, as Willow would explain to you, "Momma just likes skulls." What can I say--I'm an existentialist.