A Bewitching Pinterest Challenge

So, when I originally read that the Fall Edition of the Pinterest Challenge was upon us, I was a little sad. With everything that has been going on lately and the fact that I haven't been posting much, I didn't think there'd be any chance of my finding something on Pinterest to complete, snap pictures of, and then write up a post about. But, thanks to a school-related project, I was able to kill two birds with one stone.

A few weeks ago, my FFEA girls asked if we would be doing a Halloween project like they've done in years past. First, I should probably explain that FFEA stands for Future Florida Educators of America. I help co-sponsor the club with a colleague of mine, and we inherited the club this year from the Childhood Education teacher. The CE teacher is amazing at crafting things. My co-sponsor and I, not so much. But, we agreed that if the girls wanted to make something, then we should give it a shot. The idea was to create a little gift for the teachers on campus to show our appreciation of their hard work  which is one of the staples of our club.

Last week we had a quick meeting of the minds to figure out what kind of craft they wanted to do. You could hear crickets in the room. No, seriously, real crickets - I've told you I work in the country, right? Anyways, the girls had no idea what to do. So, I pulled up my Pinterest account and showed them some stuff I had pinned relating to Halloween. A lot of it wasn't practical for us to do. But, they eventually decided that they wanted to make these witches hats (originally from here). My co-sponsor ran out and grabbed the supplies from Wally World and made an executive decision that we would also make these broom sticks (pinned from here, but original project found here) to go along with the hats. Sold!

Before we go any further, I should probably add the disclaimer that all of the photos in this post were taken with my cell phone. I don't have one of those fancy cameras. Plus, if I did, I don't think I'd risk taking it to school anyhow.

Anyhoo, so we met up yesterday after school and made a little assembly line of sorts to create the hats & broomsticks and place them into little goodie bags.

Our amazing janitor let us use some of her gloves so that the girls didn't get any of their germs on the food. And yes, I made sure to clean all of the desks with a Lysol wipe before any food touched the surface.

Here's the finished goodies:

Some of the things we learned: (1) Make sure you have a toothpick to do the broomsticks. I didn't read that part of the directions until way too late. We used the end of a skinny paint brush. It did the job, but now I'm afraid that all of the peanut butter cups are falling apart on the inside. (2) Don't use the orange/black swirled icing. It comes out as nothing but black after the first two cookies. Basically all the squeezing mixes the two colors together. Icing is icing, and it did the job, but if you're looking for prettier witches hats, go for all orange. (3) To make 80 goodie bags with 5 students and 1 teacher will take about 45-60 minutes. I was hoping it would only take 30 minutes or so, but then again I was also hoping more girls would show up.

We were in search of some cute sayings to put in the goodie bags. After a quick Google search, I came across this website offering a free printable with a tons of cute Halloween related gift tags. Again, sold! We asked the girls which one they liked, and they all agreed that we should just print them all and each bag would have a different tag. Our school printers don't have color ink, so the tags didn't turn out as cute as the originals, but we did print them out on orange paper for the Halloween theme. Also, if we had thought ahead, we could have found some cute Halloween ribbon to tie them with, but the twist tie was what we had to work with.

Hopefully the teachers and office staff like the treat. Who am I kidding? What teacher doesn't like free food? Especially when it involves candy & cookies?!


Have you made any fun Halloween treats this year? For my teachers out there, what has been your favorite treat from student clubs/organizations (would love ideas for our next project)?

Don't forget to head over to Sherry, Katie, Sarah & Carmel's blogs and see what Pinterest creations they decided to recreate. Also, there are TONS of other projects that have been linked on their blogs, so go check them out! Oh, and happy pinning everyone!