Come Monday, another Halloween will have passed. So much candy will have been consumed that dentists across the country will be throwing big parties. The excitement that’s been building over the last month will have died down. Also, if your city is another like Toronto, you’ll start noticing that it’s getting freaking cold outside.
But we bet you had the best October ever. After all, as a faithful Bunchlander, all month long you’ve been getting ideas for yummy fall-inspired snacks, turning your humble home into a super-scary haunted house, photographing your kids while they’re trick-or-treating, techniques for carving and decorating your pumpkins, scary (but no too scary) movies to rent and what to do with those costumes once you don’t want them anymore (hint: costume swap!). And let’s not forget all of the gold costume recipes we threw your way. We’re expecting to see a lot more kids dressed as Run DMC this year. Read more...
We are dying over this blog post by Detroit dad Jim, who runs the blog Sweet Juniper with his partner-in-parenting Wood. Jim’s son wanted to be a robot for Halloween, and was leaning heavily towards the Robocop character from the 1987 movie of the same name.
After the boy decided he wanted to be Robocop, I set about trying to figure out how to make a costume. I found a couple of adults online who had made themselves Robocop costumes, but there was a whiff of that Tron Guy about them and they described multiple trips to Home Depot. So I decided just to make it out of crap I had in my basement.
Jim goes on to describe how he made the costume (the entire thing cost $12.49).
Once the costume was complete, Jim and his “little Robocop” walked around Detroit posing for pictures with cops and other fun things. The resulting photos are all in the blog post. Read more...
Photographer Robert Rafton shares tips for the best Halloween nighttime shots
Once the kids are in their costumes and ready to bring you back candy, you’re going to want pics for the family album. The problem is it’s going to be dark out. Your safe option is to take a few shots in the kitchen or somewhere else inside where there’s a lot of light. But to get images that are more in the spirit of fright and terror, head outside.
Because it will be night, if you just snap a picture with your camera in auto, it will fire its flash. This will result in that “flash look,” too bright and kind of phony-looking, like in our high-tech sample below.
No idea what to do this weekend? Bunchland’s got your back
TORONTO
What: Cedarvale’s 2nd Annual Pumpkin Parade
When: Dusk (6 p.m.) on Monday, November 1st
Where: Cedarvale Community School (corner of Ava Road and Westover Hill Road)
Price: free
The details: Remember when we wrote about pumpkin walks as a way to show off your decorated/carved pumpkins the day after Halloween? Here’s your chance to take part in one. The pathways of the park will be lined with all of the pumpkins brought in by families like yours. Last year they had 180 pumpkins. I wonder how many they’ll have this year?
My twice-a-month parenting column for Eye Weeklyposted today…
I was talking to an old friend about the unwrapped Dentyne gum pieces my kids got last Halloween, when the offer came: “Why don’t you trick-or-treat with the kids up in our neighbourhood?”
Which bugged me. I’d been in the midst of complaining that too few homes in my area gave out candy. Last year, I took the kids out — my son dressed as a jogger, my daughter as Max from Where the Wild Things Are — and conducted a six-block loop. Barely a third of the homes we passed yielded candy — not a great batting average. Turns out my neighbourhood sucks for Halloween. More…
So like seemingly every other writer in Toronto, I’ve been reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and last night around 1:30 a.m., I finished it. Was it the masterpiece it was hailed as in this review by the New York Times? Naw, I don’t think so. Its excellence follows an upward curve; it starts rough, then gets steadily more captivating until the concluding pages are approaching brilliant. But there was too much backstory for me—too much going back in the narrative and recounting past events, “He had done this,” “She had done that,” rather than recounting events as they happened—”He did this, she did that.” Recounting backstory is always less captivating than chronicling story, if only because, by recounting the past from the point of view of a future narrator, we have a clue to the end; that is, that the narrator remains alive to tell us the events we’re following. Nevertheless I thought it a fascinating depiction of a North American family, one with some problems I found particularly disturbing—and which may disturb other Bunchland readers, as well. Read more...
Professional costume designer Dana Osborne gives us a how-to
Okay, so this is actually a two-headed monster. But you get the idea.
You asked for it, and here it is: instructions for creating a three-headed monster Halloween costume. Since our costume-making skills don’t extend too far beyond cutting two holes in a bedsheet, we went to professional costume designer Dana Osborne. The materials required are all easy to find, and kids can totally help with drawing scary monster faces or picking out monster masks at the store.
Materials needed:
2 styrofoam wig heads from wig/theatrical makeup store Secondhand athletic shoulder padding that you could attach the heads to Super-adhesive epoxy glue (keep away from kids) 3 monster masks or 3 monster wigs One monster costume/shirt that you can cut holes in the top of the shoulders in for the other heads
