Jack-O-logs

Truthfully I’m not the biggest fan of Halloween. When my kids were little it was great fun, dressing them up, taking them trick or treating, stealing the good candy after they went to bed… but I am unlikely to be seen dressed up as Raggedy Ann pushing a cart around my grocery store just because it’s October 31st.

As we live out in the country we don’t see any kids at the door so I have not done the pumpkin thing for a few years. But I have this thing about logs.

In winter we heat with wood stoves. I know this sounds cozy but as the old saying goes heating with wood heats you three times – once when you chop it, once when you stack it, and once when you burn it. It’s less cozy and more like a lot of work.

But all that handling of the logs gets you – OK gets me – thinking about how pretty logs are. And gets me thinking about things I can do with them. As we stack I usually set aside a little pile of pretty logs that have captured my attention. And the next day my husband sees the little pile, sighs and throws them on the stack with the rest.

But not this time! I rescued this bunch because the bark had peeled off and the bugs had made cool tracks along the wood underneath and I could just see them as Jack-o-lanterns!

I love a craft like this one because even if I failed and they looked weird or goofy I could just burn the suckers and pretend this idea never happened. But in fact it was a lot of fun and they turned out pretty good!

With an cheap paint brush from the dollar store I washed the surface with orange acrylic paint that I watered down a bit. My goal was for it to look faded or weathered not bright orange. I looked for face ideas on Pinterest and honestly painting faces was so much easier than all those real pumpkins I massacred for years. And bonus, no fingers were sliced. One had a branch that made a perfect nose. The faces are black acrylic freehand-ed with a small paint brush, but you could also use a sharpie. A few smaller branches were glued to the tops for stems. I wanted to add raffia bows, but never did find any raffia…

So there they sit Pinky, Witchy, Moony, Jack, and Screamer. Now to wait for the kids my husband expects to see every year, that never show up. But what a good excuse to sit here with a bowl of candy!

Nancy