Day of the Dead necklace tutorial

Super cute day of the dead necklace tutorial. The skulls are from salt dough, and the flowers are tissue paper. Most of us have all the stuff already on hand. What a sweet job Alpha Mom. This would make an awsome garland as well.

Day of the Dead celebration at the museum

We went to the annual dia de los muertos celebration at our local art museum. The museum hosts several cultural festivals through out the year.

They had several crafts for kids like calavera masks, papel picado cutting, and pre-molded sugar skulls for the kids to decorate. There was a mariachi band roaming around, and we had the pleasure of listening to them while my daughter decorated her sugar skull in the art studio. There was a traditional dance troupe called Ballet folklorico, and an Aztec man who told a story & did  a traditional dance while several children played all of his rhythm instruments. There were 2 offrendas set up. One honored Frida Kahlo, and the other was a more traditional one from the Aztec culture of Mexico. It was a great day. I am very thankful to museum for providing a great celebration to participate in each year.

Free Day of the Dead recipe pack

Vegan Culinary Experience has offered up a free recipe pack.

 Here is what they say baout it in their website.

Download our special Halloween & Day of the Dead set! Click on the image to get the following holiday recipes: Spider Cookies, Black Widow Creme Pie, Witch’s Eyeballs Macaroons, Greenblood Kiwi Punch, Pan de Muertos, Sugar Skulls, Calabaza en Tacha, Pineapple Atole, and Mexican Hot Chocolate

Skeleton cookies: great for Halloween or Dia de Los Muertos

My Paper Crane  made some skeleton gingerbread cookies. I want to make some too! She links to a recipe in her post.

Calaveras masks, and other free Day of the Dead resources

We found these printable calavera masks to color inside the free 31 page PDF offered by AZ Central. The very top of the mask is cut of, but you can just fill it in with sharpie. The packet had information on Dia de Los Muertos, as well as word searches, coloring pages, and a Large skeleton you can print, cut out & put together.  We colored them in & went over some of the lines with glitter glue. Instead of making masks we mounted them on black construction paper and used them as decorations. You could print several out & make a day of the dead calavera garland.

Hp is offering a free Day of the Dead party pack you can print.

Hereis another calavera mask to print.

Librarypolooza has a free craft packet that has several crafts.

printable full size australopithecus skeleton to print for Halloween or Day of the Dead

We printed out a full size version of austaluspithecus to use as a skelton Day the Dead. Austaluspithacus was only the size of your average 5 or 6 year old.  This is a free PDF download you can get here. We made simple tissue flowers to go around her head, and drew her skull like a calavera. This was great opportunity to relate this holiday to a science lesson, while doing a fun craft project too.

 

We also make a few simple papel picados by folding a rectangle of tissue paper in half 3 times, and cutting simple shapes from both sides. We made sure to leave a couple inches at the top that we did not cut so that there would be a nice solid piece to glue, & fold over the string.  We attached some long strips of tissue to the bottoms for extra prettiness, since we had so few papel picados.

Pan De Muerto: a bread of the dead recipe

One of our favorite things about Day of the Dead is making bread of the dead, and drinking spicy hot chocolate. Try this simple recipe from global gourmet. It is much easier, and better than the one we had previously posted here.

http://www.globalgourmet.com/food/egg/egg1096/panmuert.html

Day of the Dead papel picado pattern resources

Day of the Dead is officially this Saturday & Sunday, NOvember 1st & 2nd.

I have never felt it really important to celebrate a cultural holiday on the exact day. Sometimes you can’t because of scheduling conflicts. There is nothing wrong with celebrating a holidayon a day that is just near the actual calendar holiday. That being said, I wanted to share some of the great papel picado resources I had found.

http://www.storyboardtoys.com/releases/Papel-Picado-Pattern-Simple.pdf

This one has one nice, but pretty simple pattern, and instructions. It is a PDF.

http://www.nps.gov/archive/tuma/PapelPicado.html

a couple of simple patterns & a brief history of the craft of papel picado

http://www.csupomona.edu/~plin/punched_paper/patterns.html

the patterns here a gorgeous, but a bit more complex

http://www.hsv.k12.al.us/dept/etv/geometry_pdf/gcms_program6.pdf

this one has a simple pattern on page 7 of the pdf file

http://www.librarypalooza.net/download/library_latino_style.pdf

this is a very nice 5 page pdf with papel picado, and several other day of the dead crafts.