Easy Halloween Pumpkins And Snacks

Hello lovelies! Halloween is fast approaching; which means we’re all thinking of cool decorations and snacks that we don’t see everyday! And this often means searching the depths of Pinterest for hours on end finding some pins which don’t look impossible to do at home.

So I’ve decided that I’ll put together some pumpkin decorating ideas along with two quick and easy things you can do for Halloween snacks!

Let’s get into it!

Snack first; and because it’s Halloween, that means sweet treats! So I decided to make some cute mini shortbread skeletons and mini meringue eyeballs! They’re pretty quick and easy to make and only took me about 30 minutes from start to finish.

How cute are these am I right?!

On to making them! You can buy a simple shortbread mix from most supermarket nowadays so that’s what I did as I was short on time.

Here’s the steps:

1 . Make the biscuit dough (you can use any biscuits you like).

2 . Roll out the dough out on a lightly floured surface, making the dough roughly 5mm thick.

3 .  Using a cookie cutter the shape of a person (pick whatever size you want!) cut out as many people as you can. You can always use any small pieces of dough left to make an extra biscuit for when you have a cuppa later!

4 . Bake the biscuits for however long your biscuit recipe requires and leave to cool.

5 . Once the biscuits are cool, using whatever colour icing you want, pipe on a smile, or funny face (it is Halloween aft0er all!) and the rest of the skeleton bodies!

6 . Once the icing is dry. Eat!

For the meringue eye balls:

1 . Buy some meringue kisses and some googly eye cake decorations.

2 . Make up a slightly on the thicker side icing with just water and icing sugar.

3 . Dip the googly eyes into the icing and stick on top of the meringue peaks! Done! Nice and simple.

Now, when it comes to Halloween, one of the first things we think about is sweets, costumes and of course, pumpkins. And I don’t know about you, but I love picking and carving pumpkins.. however, I’m not a massive fan of the mess that comes with it.

So this year I decided I would look into some other ways I can decorate some pumpkins, without all of the mess from carving huge ones.

Here’s my pumpkin display:

These didn’t take very long to do which I was quite surprised about! The pumpkins that took the longest were the ones that required paint, but even then they didn’t take very long.

For the painted pumpkins I used cheap Tesco water based paint as a bottle of these are £1 each which is a bargain! I also used a sharpie for the calligraphy on the large pumpkin, that one is my favourite.

Decorating the painted pumpkins were my favourite to do overall, because I love to paint anyway. The multi coloured pumpkin was decorated by squeezing paint over the top of it, a bit like how you would chocolate drips on a cake, and I simply layered up the different colours until the top of the pumpkin was covered and the paint were dripping down the sides. I suggest doing this over newspaper or some kind of wipeable surface as it gets pretty messy! I left mine to dry over a few days and the paint ran down to the bottom leaving a cool pattern.

For the biggest pumpkin, I mixed a mint green colour because I wanted the calligraphy to really stand out against the paint. Because pumpkins are pretty shiny, I ended up applying three layers of paint, but it didn’t take very long as I used my hairdryer to speed up the drying process a bit! Once I was happy with the colour of the pumpkin, I lightly drew out the ‘trick or treat’ and then filled it in with a sharpie!

The last pumpkin I painted was a tiny one, and I realised that I like the simple look of the painted pumpkins so I painted this one black and then splattered white paint on it which I think looks pretty elegant.. especially considering it’s a pumpkin!

I bought a bag of cobwebs and spiders which I used for the only pumpkin I fully carved, and I think it worked quite nicely. I actually carved this pumpkin from the bottom, because I think it looks nicer than the open top, and you can hide your carving marks. I also found a cool tip for making your carved pumpkins last longer, which is by brushing the carved areas with vegetable oil! I also stuck some spiders on the top for eyes, because I hadn’t seen anything like that done before and just thought why not.

I will admit, I think I like these two pumpkins nearly as much as the painted ones; not because they’re elegant, because they certainly aren’t that! But they are cute and pretty funny. I recommend that you have a sharp knife for cutting a mouth for these because these small pumpkin/squashes are very hard to cut! I bought some cheap vampire fangs and used peppercorns for eyes on these, all I had to do was cut a section large enough for the fangs and made some indents for the eyes and tadaa! Mini silly pumpkins!

What are your favourite ways to carve and decorate pumpkins? And what are your favourite sweet treats to make at Halloween? Let me know in the comments!

And lastly, Happy Halloween lovelies!

Love,

Going Minimalist.

So, what is minimalism, and why have I decided to go minimalist?

Minimalism is usually defined as the process of identifying what is essential in your life and eliminating the rest, so less is more.

So, why minimalist? Well, I’ve always loved how minimalist rooms look, and it seemed like a nice way of leaving stress behind and away from your personal space/stuff. My head has felt a bit scrambled, more than usual recently and in order to de-clutter my head I thought a good way to do that was to physically de-clutter my possessions. You see, I’ve always been a bit of a hoarder.. Never mountains and mountains of stuff so you can’t move around in your own home, but just generally not throwing away silly little things for some reason, which gradually built up over time.

Going minimalist isn’t something that I would suggest doing over night. It can take a fair bit of time. For me it’s taken about two weeks to get my space cleared out, and I think there’s still some more stuff I’ll throw away in the coming weeks. If you’re thinking of going minimalist, I would suggest you set yourself a plan before you begin. Because I’m a person that likes writing lists, I made two. The first one was:

1. Get yourself some inspiration.
2. Pick a time-frame.
3. List what areas you are going to clean out and sort through.

If you’re thinking of going minimalist and wanting some inspiration, here’s a Pinterest Board I made for inspiration:

Once you’ve got your inspiration and set your time-frame, it’s wise to write a list of what you want to sort out and throw away. I set myself a time-frame of two weeks to do the initial clear out; I decided one area per day was feasible for me. If you’re struggling for where to start which clearing out your stuff, here’s my clear out list:

1. Clothes and Shoes. (I created a Capsule Wardrobe – post coming soon)
2. Underwear, Bags and Purses.
3. Toiletries, Makeup and Nail Polishes.
4. Papers, Books and Magazines.
5. DVDs.
6. Electronics and CDs.
7. Receipts, Bills and Important Documents.
8. Stationary and Hobby Stuff.
9. Junk Drawers and Random Boxes.
10. Workspace.
11. Emails, Subscriptions and Phone Apps.
12. Photos and Sentimental Stuff.
13. The Car.
14. The Mind.

By going minimalist, I’ve been able to stream line getting ready for everything, all because I know and can see exactly what I own. I also feel less stressed, can find anything I need quickly and I now have more space.

I found it easy to fall into the trap of organising instead of purging, so I would recommend having an image that was your inspiration or write down why you’re going minimalist so you don’t just organise and keep unnecessary things. I’ve decided that if I don’t use it and it’s not an important document or sentimental then I need to lose it.

Something I’ve learnt from this is to stop bargain hunting. This one is a big one for me, I love a good bargain, but that’s part of the reason why I needed a good clear out in the first place. So I’ve started avoiding meaningless impulse shopping, which has been pretty good for keeping my room clear and my bank account fuller.

When I decide to buy something, I try and think of how it will be used in my room in six months time. If I think it will be no longer useful then, I have to think if it was really worth my money right now? Is it something that I am willing to swap/replace another item I own.

As I was sorting through everything I made a few different piles of stuff:

• Keep.
• Bin.
• Check back in 6 weeks.
• Charity.

Putting everything into different piles allowed me to sort through everything without any guilt. I decided to have a ‘check back in 6 weeks’ pile because some things I was not ready to give or throw away. Becoming minimalist is going to be a bit of an ongoing project of mine, I plan to go through everything every 6 months to make sure I don’t re-clutter and keep everything streamlined.

Just a pre-warning, when you start clearing stuff out, it will look worse before it gets better. So don’t worry if your space looks like a bombs hit it!! Here’s my room before and during the clear out!!

 

 

I ended up finding that I had 200 DVDs, about half a wardrobe of clothes & shoes that I didn’t wear or that didn’t fit which were donated to charity and I had roughly 11 bin bags full of just general rubbish that I used to hide away in my wardrobe. I realised that having 200 DVD’s was taking up a large amount of space and just didn’t look great on display and
I had no space for them anywhere else; then I had a flash back to the 90’s where we all carried around CD books with us everywhere. So that’s why I then ordered a big DVD case that holds 208 discs from Amazon, which can be taken anywhere and it’s nice knowing all my films are in the same place.

Here’s some pictures of my space now it’s all cleared out!!

Hope you all have a great week and let me know if you try going minimalist!

Love,